Photo By Tech. Sgt. Rob Hazelett | From left: Maj. Elrae Epps, Air Reserve Personnel Center chief technical adviser, Col....... read more read more
By Lt. Col. Michael A. Ortiz, Air Reserve Personnel Center chief digital officer
BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. - Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel Center, Denver, is a Human Resource Management Center that serves over 1.3 million active, Reserve, Guard and retired Airmen. ARPC, since its establishment in 1954, has consistently exploited technology in order to provide the best service to generations of American Airmen. This started in the 1950s with an RCA 501 Electronic Data Processing system, the first of its kind to be installed west of Mississippi, to execute various personnel programs in the Air Force Reserve through today in which ARPC is now moving Customer Relationship Management software to a Software as a Service commercial cloud - the first in DOD.
In June 2014, ARPC leadership went against the bureaucratic grain and took a calculated risk in pulling resources from day-to-day work to establish an innovation office. This office was an investment to provide continuous improvement through disruptive innovation and relationship building. The IO exists to serve generations of Airmen through innovation and efficiency using business organization, innovation tactics, business efficiency models and enterprise architecture principles.
The commander of ARPC, Brig. Gen. Samuel "Bo" Mahaney, provided clear guidance to exploit technology, experiment with innovation and provide leading edge solutions to business-to-business and business-to-customer dilemmas. The IO is the central focal point for the commander to ensure all innovation and efficiency solutions are assessed, analyzed, developed, tested and launched to improve customer experience and agent experience.
We are now seeing the same approach by the defense secretary, Ash Carter. Soon after accepting the office of secretary of defense in the spring of 2015, Carter published several opinion-editorials highlighting the need for the DOD to “Toss vintage personnel systems” and to partner with industry experts from Silicon Valley to design, build and launch best in breed technology solutions with the Department of Defense.
It is no wonder that ARPC efforts seemed to naturally complement the initiatives of the SECDEF when they were introduced nearly a year after ARPC started its initiatives. This is because Mahaney was a fellow in the National Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School when Carter taught there.
In August, Mahaney and a team of innovative professionals from across the Air Force Personnel Enterprise visited Oracle and LinkedIn in Silicon Valley. The visit to Silicon Valley was a planned visit after extensive collaboration with Oracle and relationship building with LinkedIn. The goal for ARPC was to build relationships with private sector Information Technology companies to learn and share best in breed practices to enhance the Air Force’s customer engagement.
ARPC shared the customer experience with Oracle by providing advice to their CRM, Enterprise Resource Planning and Oracle Policy Automation tools representative. At LinkedIn, ARPC learned many lessons regarding how the government should focus on user experience design when designing customer facing self-service applications web and smart device channels to service their customers better.
| Date Taken: | 10.07.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 10.07.2015 14:40 |
| Story ID: | 178361 |
| Location: | BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, CO, US |
| Hometown: | AURORA, CO, US |
| Hometown: | BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, CO, US |
| Hometown: | DENVER, CO, US |
| Web Views: | 751 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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