The U.S. Army has made significant strides in digital transformation over the past few years, and officials from the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) and the U.S. Army Cyber Command shared on Feb.12 how ServiceNow has been a “force multiplier” in those efforts.
At the ServiceNow Federal Forum in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 12, the Army officials explained how ServiceNow has helped to drive asset transparency and operational efficiency.
Nathan Ford, the director of enterprise service management at Army Cyber Command, said his team partnered with ServiceNow to launch the Army Enterprise Service Management Platform (AESMP).
“It’s the first time the Army has had an asset management solution for IT assets at the enterprise level,” Ford said.
“We’re kind of in a crawl, walk, run stage,” he said, adding, “So, we’ve been crawling, and every now and then we can pull ourselves up and look around and see the environment for the first time, which is really exciting times.”
Ford explained that Army Cyber Command is still trying to teach folks in the field how to leverage these capabilities. He said it is also looking to identify the entire asset population and “actually produce the first viable configuration management database for the Army.”
“As we moved into AESMP, what we did was we united what were theater-based service management solutions into one unified, cloud-based SaaS through ServiceNow. So, we brought all of that together for the first time,” Ford said.
Now, Ford said the Army has the ability to look at performance metrics, time to resolution, and leadership data.
“We’re starting to drive into where our performance issues are, where our lack of resources might be a problem, and it’s information we’ve just never been able to visualize this way before,” he said. “It’s exciting times for us. We’re looking forward to completing the asset management rollout.”
Similarly, Douglas Enfield – the chief of the Public Works Systems Branch, Infrastructure Sustainment Division of the Headquarter Installation Management Command G4 at AMC – said that ServiceNow has helped his team become more efficient with maintenance requests.
Enfield said AMC just celebrated the fourth birthday of the Army Maintenance Application (ArMA) website. The website allows anyone who lives and works on an Army installation to send a digital maintenance request to the Directorate of Public Works.
“Anybody that’s there can submit a maintenance request. They do that on the ServiceNow platform using CSN [Customer Service Management], and we receive that at their local Public Works,” Enfield explained. “So, we’re able to do those maintenance requests a lot faster and a lot more efficiently.”
Before Public Works had ServiceNow, Enfield said the average length of completion for a work order was about 28 days.
“Now with that digital communication, with pictures, with our technicians being able to converse via the platform to get things done, we are now seeing that in about 14 days,” he said.
“We’re seeing our time-to-task and completion rate go way, way down, and that has not necessarily led to efficiencies and cost savings, but the amount of work that we’re able to get done, it’s what we call a force multiplier without a doubt,” Enfield said.
For more insights, check out the entire session on demand.
