PEO Perspective October 2019

Happy New Fiscal Year! It’s been a busy year, and the PEO EIS team has achieved some notable accomplishments. The Army’s top priorities of readiness, modernization and reform continue to be our guiding principles, and we’ve made great strides toward these goals.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS
PEO EIS has made judicious use of the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) as a tool to deliver prototypes, understand the art of the possible, reduce risk and rapidly deliver production capability to our stakeholders.

The partnership between ARCYBER and PEO EIS this past year has produced a number of exciting new initiatives. Implementation of Defensive Cyber Operation (DCO)’s Forge and SOSSEC consortium, created to stay one step ahead of a rapidly changing cyber threat, is allowing us to develop and deploy new cyber capability in 90 days. This coalition is also directly responsible for the success of Enterprise IT as a Service (EITaaS), a pilot program exercising OTAs to award three prototype agreements to non-traditional defense contractors who will deliver capability to Army installations across the continental U.S.

We are also deploying the Army Leader Dashboard prototype to warfighting commands, providing near real-time data analytics to inform strategic resource decisions, and we have embraced commercial best practices using software as a service and hosting this capability in the cloud.

This year we also exercised OTAs for Accessions Information Environment (AIE) and the Army Training Information System (ATIS), and our Task Management Tool (TMT) was selected as the standard across DoD, increasing our scope of effort and enabling strategic resourcing and economies of scale. EIS continues to transition programs to sustainment or to their functional organizations, an effort directly synchronized with the Secretary of the Army’s Transition to Sustainment initiative, allowing our PMs to focus resources on new critical developmental efforts.

We hosted a record 18 leadership changes and ceremonies this past year, including welcoming a new Assistant PEO and two new PMs and confirming Brendan Burke as our permanent Deputy PEO. We said farewell to several colleagues who transitioned to retirement or to development opportunities, and welcomed impressive new talent. As a direct result of our talent management efforts, we hired a cohort of six new deputy project managers to support the O-6 project offices, and they have already made substantial impacts.

AFCEA BELVOIR LUNCHEON
It was a pleasure to continue the tradition of keynoting the AFCEA Belvoir luncheon late last month, where I talked to our industry partners about my priorities and lines of effort for the year ahead: Talent Management, Stakeholder Management, and Software and Network Integration. This year, I want to continue to stress the importance of data in all things we do, and as I announced at the AFCEA Belvoir luncheon, the addition of a PM for data within PEO EIS is part of a reorganization effort to address this key focus area. Stay tuned for more details on how we’re improving Army information readiness and data agility to facilitate fact-based and resource-informed decision making. You can find my slides from the luncheon on the Events page.

STAND DOWN AND ALL SAINTS BALL
I hosted a stand down at Fort Belvoir the first week of October, providing our Soldiers and civilians with mandatory training covering a wide range of topics, including an all-hands update, command climate survey results, vital annual training and workshops. To conclude the week of hard work and training, we held our second annual PEO EIS All Saints Ball at the Waterford in Springfield, Virginia. This sold-out event was an evening of tradition and heraldry recognizing our exemplary workforce and the history and contributions of each Army branch.

CROSS SERVICES SUMMIT
This month I’m excited to host a Cross Services Summit here at Fort Belvoir, where PEO leaders from across the services will meet to talk about where we intersect in our efforts and engagements and how we might partner in the future. I’ve been talking to my colleague, Navy PEO EIS Ruth Youngs Lew, and we have a full agenda of collaborative initiatives.

AUSA
The Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference will take place at the Washington Convention Center October 14-16. You won’t want to miss Col. Enrique Costas, project manager for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems, who will join Army leaders from PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (C3T), the Network Cross Functional Team (CFT), and CIO/G-6 on an IT modernization panel Monday morning, October 14, hosted by C4ISRNET, and Mr. Burke and I will be meeting with our industry and stakeholder partners throughout the week. Please check our Events page the second week of October for the most up-to-date information.

A reminder that the organizational chart for PEO EIS is available as a downloadable .pdf on this site for a quick overview of the leaders to contact for a meeting or discussion about how to support the mission, and make sure to visit the Business Opportunities page, where you can download a copy of the latest procurement forecast, newly updated last week.

Thank you for your continued support of PEO EIS and its programs, products and services. The more competition, the better for the Army -- I’m committed to partnering with industry and look forward to meeting with you at upcoming events!

Connecting the Army. Working for Soldiers.

Chérie A. Smith

Program Executive Officer Enterprise Information Systems