WASINGTON, Oct. 10 -- New Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey has become a big promoter of business transformation, the top civilian dealing with the program said.
“You have a champion, now, I think, in the chief of staff of the Army for the next four years to do the things that we’ve undertaken,” Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for Business Transformation Michael Kirby said.
Kirby was emceeing a panel on business transformation in the Army that featured Lt. Gen. N. Ross Thompson III, the military deputy/director, Army Acquisition Corps Office; Lt. Gen. Robert Wilson, the assistant chief of staff for installation management/commanding general, Installation Management Command; and Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sorenson, who has been nominated to be the next chief information office of the Army. A handful of other officers and civilians also gave brief case-study talks about specific business transformation programs in which they were involved.
Kirby compared Casey with former Army Chief of Staff Creighton Abrams, who also overhauled Army business practices. He quoted Abrams: “The Pentagon is a mystical animal. You cut off its tentacles it grows more. We’ve wounded it, but the great thing lies there mad about it, biding its time, waiting for a chance to get its grip on everything again in its suffocating bureaucratic way with the objective of stifling all action.”
Abrams, Kirby noted, was the last theater commander who then ascended to the senior office position. “What did General Abrams do? He reorganized the business structure of the Army,” Kirby said. “What do you have General Casey focusing on? … He’s focusing on the institutional processes that get our work done to support the theatre commander. And why do they do that? I would submit to you it’s the first principal of business transformation: It’s customer focus. They were the customer.”
He added: “They’re coming back and looking at the force that gave them the people, the doctrine, the equipment that took care of the families of the soldiers in the field. All of these things that the generating force does, the individual process does, and they’re saying, ‘You can do better.’ And that’s our challenge.”
POC:
John Grady
Director of Communications
Association of the United States Army
703-907-2613
jgrady@ausa.org