Proving Organizational Changes Benefits Using Requisite Organization Principles

Speaker A My name is Tom Kelly, and I'm the deputy Undersecretary of the army. And where we are now is that we're at a pretty tough crossroads in terms of the the world environment that we're in and the budget constraints and the requirement for us to fill up our fighting force and to slim down and move our soldiers from the overhead force into the fighting force and to move resources from the overhead force into the fighting force to speed up decision making, to deal with the fact that we're in an environment where things are changing at a very rapid pace. And so our Secretary has focused his efforts on the business transformation side of the army. The Chief of Staff has been working to creating our modular force and the Secretary has been working on creating the overhead army and driving the overhead army to be more efficient and effective, to take the cost out, the time out and speed up decision making. So where we are today in terms of our efforts, we have brought Dr. Clement on to help us redesign that overhead army. And the first project, the Secretary believes that he needs to demonstrate his commitment by freeing up resources inside his own organization. So he started out with our Administrative Assistance Office, and that office is mandated in law that the Secretary shall have an administrative assistant. And the office has grown from a few hundred people to over 3300 people. And so using the organizational design principles, we've slimmed that down to about 700. We moved a couple of functions out, but more importantly, we looked at the work and we looked at the levels and the complexity and rebuilt that organization. And that was phase one. Phase two, we're going to get into leaning the processes out and we expect to generate efficiencies there as well. But by demonstrating to the army staff and to the army at large that he's serious inside his own organization, it sets an example for the rest of the headquarters and then the rest of the major commands.