presenting you with captain mike moe o'leary from the chief of naval operations office digital transformation office and today we're going to be talking about how do you conduct digital transformation especially in large scale organizations like the department of the navy and so we're going to dive into a little bit of a background on some of the work that mike has done and then also offer some of his insights into how to do this uh from his from his experiences his lessons learned how do you do this in other dod organizations um and agencies as well so mike thank you for joining us today alex thank you for having me today it's uh it's always a pleasure to share the story of where we are and uh things we've learned along the way um especially since i'm gonna be departing the pattern here soon it's always great to try to share and um things i learned the hard way numerous times typical aviator can't learn the right way the first time gonna learn the hard way numerous times uh as we go forward and alex is laughing because alex is a fellow aviator so uh as we go forward but before i jump into some of the things we're doing alex i just kind of give a little background about my passion about a lot of the work we're doing sure i had several tours before uh career aviator command of the squadron command and installation um but my passion for this work comes from my time in non-flying jobs or non-command jobs first one was i was working at the joint warfare analysis center got sent forward to afghanistan and my job was to uh to use the office space reference talk to the customer so the engineers didn't have to but really what i was doing i you know i was briefing the likes of brigadier general milly figurative general mcconville when they were the dcgo and dcgs for uh 101st airborne in afghanistan and they're now four stars and i'm just a captain so if that tells you anything about my career but part of my job was going around and trying to get data out of these enclaves they're on hard drives or on share drives sharepoint was still kind of new back then so it was just a challenge and i literally went around afghanistan to get data to load up into joax portal to send back to the the the analysts could do their job because you can't do analytics you can't come up with ways to do things better without data and so that was my first first real eye opener of how bad our data situation was in the dod and there's probably a bunch of people out there who are on our camera probably shaking their heads like yep yep i know that pain my next foray into that was uh post squadron command i went to work for animal van valley's admiral van buskirk when he was the chief committee personnel i was at his n1z and we had this big tasker come down from then ceno greener saying hey i want to start getting after this health of the force thing and i want you to prevent it at nephosies in like four months so we had four months to try to pull this thing together that turned into this battle rhythm of reports it would take me three months just to get data predominantly from people who worked for admiral van buskirk and some externally so just the battle of trying to keep track of all the data how do you normalize it how you present it uh big passion of mine and it's it was the first attempt i saw in the navy trying to get off that i personally saw in the navy of trying to use data to try to inform our policies and our decision making and our budget processes as well as testimony of congress and things of that nature so a little bit of a passion project getting to come to the digital transformation office working under dr uh o'connell and uh try to get after some of these things so where where we are with servicenow to kind of tell the bigger story about the transformation and i'll kind of focus in on some of the lessons learned for our intersection with you guys uh coming through here at the time uh we were trying to work a horizontal integration across the enterprise uh doing a digital inventory of all the activities across dod or excuse me department of the navy or the service of the navy sorry i keep uh expanding it out by the time i finish this job i'll say we saw world hunger but um we uh we were trying to do that uh as we came across as well as do educational materials and other sorts of things and trying to enable people to do some quick wins uh and when you say quick wins you're really talking about more the mission owner's side of the house because i think a lot of times people think digital transformation these major monumental efforts that are taking place at the peos and ciscons of the world but you're talking about the mission owner space where largely you know to your experiences were not those they were in the mission space and trying to transform how some of the work is done there right absolutely and there was work at the larger efforts too because again initially there was a big trying to take it all off fight it all off at once and um and while we were doing that the cno's navigation plan came out in 2021 and the vice chief said hey doc o'connell i want your guys to dive hard into that so we giving our bandwidth we had to abandon some of these larger horizontal integration efforts and really what it turned into was that larger top-down sort of approach turned into us taking on certain navigation plan objectives and making those pilots into enterprise analytics and trying to get after along with all our partners so this isn't just dto doing this alone we're working with all the peos we're working with a lot of different shops a lot of different people to kind of get after that but something that i found lacking based upon a promise that doc o'connell made to the chaplain corps before i even joined dto to help them get out of their on-prem sharepoint solution that they were trying to use and predominantly to show the efficacy of the chaplain program because i don't know how familiar one is every three to five years the question goes why do we have chaplains why do chaplains exist what value do they add when we're in a constrained budget environment why are we paying for chaplains and all the chaplaincy work when we could use those money and that those those end state those end strength numbers to do more warfighting or more supply or more supporting efforts um so they came to doc o'connell said hey we need help so while while they were trying to figure out where to get them uh simultaneously we were helping uh the watch floor the pentagon watch for in three five watch florida battle watch captain do covid reporting and they're doing that all the enable message traffic and um we we used what we had available and and when i say we i mean i had a team of people i had dave carroll on my team uh several other people now i have travis swayatoka who were respectively my technical directors because uh if people haven't figured out yet not a technical guy um knuckle dragger aviator uh understands the power of data understands how to help people do analytics but i don't do the analytics not not this guy technical enough to be dangerous yes i'm like a kid with a stick of dynamite and a match let me go and that's kind of why i like to call myself a digital insurgent because we're running into issues of trying to get the chaplaincy out of the model of how they were working so they were they put requirements out they threw some money at it they got an on-prem sharepoint solution hosted under cnic's g2 um and quite frankly it wasn't a great solution um it was what they had available at the time and it was very challenging for them although going back to before i drive completely into this uh our covet tracker for the pentagon watch floor we use the uh secnav portal which is on-prem sharepoint to help it out and there we saved over a thousand personnel hours a day across the navy to help reduce that just because we could actually bring things in we could it could be normalized and standardized and much cleaner on the input so the number of hours you spend just trying to get after clean resolve issues was now spent on how do we visualize the better how do we tell the story better and so we reduced those hours and we enabled better decision making based on what was going on around the navy but i share that story only because when we start talking about what the what we did for the chaplains and the value of bringing them into a low code software as a service solution is very much similar in that we're trying to improve analytics trying to make getting data easier trying to spend more time making decisions on the data rather than finding and analyzing the data so that's where that's where my journey begins with the insurgency we're having issues of getting the chaplains into something that was going to solve all their pain points the latency of entering the data ashore was incredibly long the um the ability to do it afloat was almost non-existent just because the latency issues are sure you're not going to have that you're not gonna have the bandwidth afloat as well as it's tri-service it's navy marine corps and coast guard so we couldn't do just a navy only solution because we had to be able to deploy this across multiple services in multiple ways so going into a cloud native tenant and with a low code application software as a service so we're not managing anything we're consuming we don't want the chaplains worrying about how many servers do i have when it needs to be updated and all the rest of the tech stack we just push that stuff away and honestly it's what industry is doing too everyone's understanding the value of buying commodities from people who who are experts in it that's the whole point is to leverage people who do this for a living they do it at scale and they do it exceptionally well it drives down your cost so no longer are you paying people paying for infrastructure all those other things you're just consuming and you're paying them and they're managing it at the end at this big hyperscale level so that the cost to you is actually less money than it would be if you did it yourself so hence why we kind of went into different solutions so we looked around we came up with that and so what we came to was servicenow one of the other criteria i had besides being modern and unlocking all the future potential that i'll get into was i needed to already be ato i didn't want to run through the 650 things you have to go through to get an authority to operate on a dod system not interested in that at all and uh thankfully servicenow has their low code app engine they were ato in il4 with an il2 enclave meeting a lot of my tick marks and we can also do mobile and bring your own device which again makes a lot of sense for a lot of things so now we're unlocking all the potential solving a lot of the problems and the latency issues uh now we have things that can operate in a detailed environment i.e like your normal cell phone you can type a text or an email and then when you get connectivity it sends um that sort of that sort of mentality i can capture the information in a stateful way and then when i get connected it'll push it all up so that's kind of how we came to be uh the chaplains came to us in terms of finding the right right project again and this is all the things we're doing in dto are all basically pilots they're all do a little bit figure out how it works do it small and then how do we figure out how to scale this and then we're turning this over to peolbs innovation solution services that they stood up almost a year ago they got funding this fiscal year and they're starting to take on a lot of these projects and are actually starting to see the value of what we did with the chaplains for other folks like the nav ig and potentially jag core and some other folks that are coming in who have similar pain points similar processes they want to modernize as they come across so i'll hit on a few of the other uh pain points for the chaplains and one of the reasons one of the things you may want to consider when you're doing your own is okay the chaplains are going around they're talking about how long they provided this service and this other service but something that's of value to the enterprise writ large that's been stuck in ensconced inside on-prem sharepoint and not exposed to the larger enterprise was resiliency data they're talking with sailors marines and coast guard men every day there's 1600 chaplains and rp's across the three services every day out talking with service members about destructive behaviors suicide related behaviors drinking drugs domestic violence those sorts of things and we're not giving that data over to opnevn17 op93 the osri team out at the surface action group that they were trying to figure out how destructive behaviors were contributory towards those two collisions out in seven fleet years before so i'm like man wouldn't it be great if we got these guys the the chaplain core and you know all the chaplains and rp's across all the services to be able to add value into this so they can not only can they do their own analytics in terms of hey this is the service we provided here's where it is now they're adding value in other ways to provide that data up to the enterprise for the enterprise to take advantage as it comes across we haven't got to that point yet but we're getting there and for those who don't know uh the navy's enterprise uh platform is jupiter which is a subset of ivana i have to get my pitch in for for the jupiter team and and uh don ceo and don cdo who who own the platform um and so jupiter is a navy subset of advanta and uh currently ivana is backboned in amazon web services so it's completely cloud native they migrated everything up into the cloud back to the cloud cloud performance and taking advantage of cloud level services uh as we come across so that opened up a few of our um opportunities so what we wound up doing is we we got a tenant uh dave carroll was authorized to uh sign on behalf of the navy because he's a ip officer in reserves and um he was uh he was able to get us an op nav tenant so we were messing around in there trying to figure out what we could do we're like you know what we should do let's just demonstrate what we can do with the chaplain core the chaplains and rps let's do a hackathon let's bring them in for a week and let them build their own app show people that the bar to be able to build your own app and maintain your old app is lowered you know so instead of like before where you pay a bunch of money a year two years later something comes back and you're like great i don't know this isn't close to what i want we actually have the citizen developers developing their own processes the people who work these processes every day who know the information who know the environment are the ones developing the code via the app when i say code they're not writing code it's it's very low code drag and drop table matches all the back end stuff happens magically predominantly and i'll talk about some of the constraints as we go forward for lessons learned as we go forward but so we did that so in late august naval x hosted us uh let us come in we had 30 chaplains and rp's that they picked um one of the big things i would say any project you do is have a champion from the mission set um obviously i'm a champion for the navy um amongst a lot of other people who are very interested in making this happen so we're getting a lot of support from peo digital and mlb in these scenarios as well as other people so this isn't uh this isn't just dto running completely although i do like to call us a digital insurgents because quite frankly i didn't really have permission from my boss to do this and um so i just did it figuring hey i'm not a technical guy if it doesn't work if it fails he can just say that guy's an idiot um well it's a plausible deniability right exactly i'm like what's to lose what are you going to do shave my head make me retire as a captain of the navy sure what there's not much they can really do to me at this point so uh moe's off camera right now so if you don't know he's uh his his hair is different than mine i'm follicly challenged yes but the uh so we did that and they at the end of the week really we spent the first half of the week just getting a bunch of people familiar with the platform servicenow brought in the team to help facilitate the entire week um and a great job with that very well led very uh professorial uh very teacher uh sometimes he's talked to the collegiate level and sometimes he talked at the kindergarten level for people like me to understand uh and it was great it worked out really really well uh as we did that and we had we had everyone every week we brought in food they everything was kind of catered so we had people captured for an entire week away from their things we didn't do uniforms we just said hey everyone's here to be a teammate all the things you normally do to try to lower the bar in inhibitors of people who want to add value to a process we had we had our junior enlisted rp's all the way up to captains so they really started developing the app about mid-afternoon on wednesday and then friday afternoon 48 hours later they demoed a mobile and web-based cloud-based via the web solution to admiral todd who's now the chief of chaplains or yeah he's chief of chaplains now uh mr james mosher from n83 and doc o'connell my boss on what they did in a week and they showed how they can enter data in a very easy way very stateful way it's much more intuitive you can do it on your phone with your thumb because before what they were doing was every friday they said thou shall report and it would take them hours to enter all this data it would hang up you'd have to go back it was just not a great system now you have a system where you can enter as you go and then we created post the beta a validation workflow so that chaplains know that on that friday the person who enters it can go through and start this workflow inside servicenow look at all their entries validate them say i'm good hit a button it goes up to their next supervisor for them to go oh good look what they put in i like all that that those numbers look right validate so now you have a a chalk line snap of when the data has been validated it provides additional oversight from their supervisor to the subordinate chaplains and rps to say you put your data in so it's increasing the the visibility of the chain of command it's improving the data quality which is our other problems because on a good week and this comes from the chaplains i said how how many people actually report on a good week and they said about 50 percent i was like oh my goodness because the app was so hard to use or you couldn't use it when you're deployed so think about all the stresses of all the people who are having all these issues deployed and we're not capturing that data awful and you look at to their ultimate goal is to validate that they have the right people with the right skill sets in the right areas of the navy to provide services that they need and when you're getting 50 reporting and of that the data may not even be 100 accurate out of that 50 right then how can you make informed decisions about it down the road exactly and they said on the best week they ever they have is 50 percent of people report and i said well of those 50 how many are doing just enough to not get yelled at and they said about half so on a good week they're maybe getting 25 good data which you cannot really use for enterprise analytics it's just not it's just not a high enough representation to say what i'm doing is valid across the enterprise um so that was another thing that allowed us to do we you can enter data as you go you're not just stuck to reporting at once so if you got five minutes you can enter your data from your previous thing oh by the way i failed to mention this because people are probably gonna ask we're doing this aisle two because the chaplains don't capture any pii at all on the people they talk with it's very anonymized so it's like a male e5 from this command i talk to that person about x y xyz and that's as deep as it goes it's very much like a mishap report or any other kind of naval message we send out where we're saying something happened to somebody but it's all anonymized it's very similar uh as you go across so we're able to do bring your own device and all these other sorts of features into this solution so pretty excited about that but here's the opportunities that opens up besides that all right the now that we're in a cloud native platform we can do what's called blue green i like to call it blue gold you have a dev environment where you can make your next you can make all your changes and whatnot that's not affecting your production site so the production site is what you see when you go to when you go to your web browser your mobile you go through you and this is where you're collecting your data and things like that meanwhile over here you could be building your next version of your app doing all your updates your bug smashes all those other things oh by the way after the hackathon the person who was doing all that work was a navy captain chaplain who has no i.t background no coding background at all so he was built he was smashing his own bugs with a small team of people working through that development uh environment so it starts opening up the opportunity for agile ops you can update your app more often because no longer do you need a team of professional coders for everything you need to do that's not to say you don't need some form of pro dev you do and that'll be when i get the lessons learned i'll hit that again um there are things that are too hard to do because certain functionalities are that are not completely out of the box or just difficult to understand if you do it wrong you can really mess things up you do need some pro dev support but again instead of needing 100 pro dev support you can really lower it down to where i just buy support hours and not have a full-time dedicated person on my staff who does this work i can just pull them in as i need to to do certain things and work so now i can have my system queue up oh by the way the nice thing about servicenow and other platforms too but servicenow since we're talking about servicenow in the chat app or the rmt at sorry i keep calling the chatbot that's just my nickname for it it you can capture all those all those bug things inside the app itself inside the platform itself and have all that stuff queued up of all the things the change requests the bug or things can all be queued up for you to help facilitate to do your to do your quarter review boards or six month review boards whatever you want to do as you go through your through your list of all the things you want to fix on the next release so as you're working through and going through and you validate and knock all those things off further also built in the platform because my concern was going forward when people start rolling out of jobs we have a knowledge management section in there so we can put how-to videos we can put to how do you if you're the the person in charge of the app how does that person do their job we can capture all of that within the platform so again it's not stuck on some share drive or some other place it is built within the app itself and you can sit there and do all those things as we come across so that's some of the some of the big things uh coming across there that i really was excited about and also that it's cloud we haven't built the endpoints yet i'm still waiting for some other things to mature before we start unlocking data to go into ju to make it available to jupiter expose it to jupiter i should say because i i don't i'm not a fan of replicating data for the sake of replicating data exposing it to another environment and it's something that navy large is working on peonlb is working on a common api environment that will build that data catalog that will enable people to go not just at the enterprise but if you're working in your own environment you could theoretically pull in data from other portions of mission logistics and business systems by the way that's what mlb stands for for those who don't know it's uh i'm sorry manpower logistics business systems you could theoretically have those things exposed to you where you could work within your own native environment um you know if you do the standard i just need to know about descriptive and maybe diagnostic things down at my level and then at the enterprise levels where you start getting predictive and prescriptive because when you start doing that you have to expose your data to other data to really start getting after those sorts of things you need structured and unstructured to really get the prescriptive you need to have all those things come together to get to that but that's not what the chaplains really wanted but that's the value to the enterprise and the values of the chaplains is now they have an agile platform that they can predominately maintain themselves they have a lot more control and say over what's in there and one of the other opportunities is the other way around now that we're when we get to the end state where the chaplains have their data exposed to jupiter and the otnav n17s the oz routine the n83 team is out doing their destructive behaviors analytics and they go wouldn't it be great if they could while they're talking with sailors marines and coast guard men if they could ask this question a different way or if they could add a question to that they can make that request back down to the the business unit the small business unit of the navy the chaplains and say would you consider adding this because this is the value to the enterprise so when you talk to sailors could you add that and they would go through their thing run things up to admiral todd get his blessing sorry pun not intended there i apologize um i can't i can't help myself sometimes um and then and then incorporate that at a future build as they go through with their as they come through their system there and of course the nice thing and about the blue and green or the blue and gold things is you can do that stuff offline in your dev environment run it test it make sure it's good kick it over to go into production and then again because they don't manage it p.o digital actually manages the tenant for them they can make sure from the security and and all the other uh sorts of things that it gets put into the production environment and it's safe it's not going to be it's not going to break the system and it's not going to violate any of the other things that it currently has so that's kind of the um the big overview that took 30 minutes i apologize no that was great and i think you you really touched on a few key things which is you really need to have buy-in um it's got to be you know from leadership and from the mission owner if if you're creating an app if they're if they're creating their app they're going to have buy-in they're going to want to see it through effectively and in a way that that satisfies the needs that they have um and then having that buy-in from the leadership to understand how does this support the bigger picture i mean i i think you had the vision early on but not the rest of the organization around how does this data feed into jupiter and the types of things that goes there but also like it's lending itself to servicenow on ships which opens up a whole nother window of things that the navy can do it's being agile in this way allows a lot of other things that kind of other doors to present themselves and then all it all it is is just a matter of opening it and walking through it um but there's also you know the importance of of understanding the technology you know if it's a three-legged stool it's like you gotta have the mission owners you gotta have the uh an understanding of the technologies that are out there and available and in some ways that's to your point being uh just techno uh technologically savvy enough to be dangerous and also knowing who in the ecosystem is doing what it was important that peo digital was a part of this because they were though they were not if you hadn't had that connection with travis and and the folks back at peo it would have been a lot harder to pull off but so it's a networking thing a personal networking thing as much as it is a technology thing um and then lastly is the is the the industry side of it having the right industry partners um do those types of things so as a follow-on set of questions kind of get into the meat of how do we help others do this first thing i have for you is at other agencies and even the navy itself looking at how do we repeat this first you need to find that right mission owner what are the recommendations you have for pinpointing who's the right mission owner to work with on a digital insurgency like this one so it he can start small right and you look for those easy low-hanging fruit things look for um because most people think digital transformation is just it and you just take your current process and you just move it over and now it's just digital you're like you have an opportunity to really modernize how you do things so that that's where i would recommend looking first is who's in a legacy platform with things that are easily automated how do i use workflows and apis and microservices basically where i connect a bunch of different things via api to work together to reduce your man-hour personnel hours improve data quality things of that nature and normally you want to start with a small group because it's easier to get the buy-in from a smaller group it's not as cost intensive to do it and if it doesn't work for whatever reason um because that's the other thing we didn't really get to what i wanted to do in the navy was have a um if if i were to have full reigns if i was in another organization where they said hey michael larry we're going to give you money how would you do this how would you bring all these small business units from this bottom-up effort this digital insurgency where i'm transforming village to village and eventually it becomes this larger where people are lining up to join the team i had more people lined up than i can handle which is the goal if i had incubation space i would have brought them in taught help them walk through the process teach them how to do their governance teach them how to program and do these things teach them how their curiosity for coming through and making major upgrades rather than just small bug fixes come through as go through that so i would look for ones that fit whatever platform i'm using um again workflows are incredible uh think about your staffing packages why do we still print things out and walk them around for wet signatures right we have the ability to digitally sign things again and that's adobe right we can have adobe plugged into certain things with the appropriate level to do those things that's not inherent in servicenow or other platforms that's another service that comes in to enable your job as you come across there we use a multi different services all day we use identity from the navy and other sorts of things to say this is me doing these things here as we come across here so none of these things is ever going to be that and one of the other things is what's going to give me the best roi or roe return on effort um as we come across because you're never going to win the day if your solution costs more and that was one of the other things that servicenow was a great partner with is i need to show how this is cheaper than them doing on-prem sharepoint so i increased their capability increased their data quality opened up all these opportunities oh by the way it costs a lot less and the number of personnel hours just doing the reporting has gone way down data quality's gone up we now have analytic capability and man we're off to the races so that's where i would start looking is looking for those those things that are very easy things that are very manually intensive right now or just laborious to do repetitive processes things of that nature is where i would look look for small ones prove that those people who are in those business units because you that's the other thing is you don't want to alienate people and make them fear for their jobs you want to enable people with digital with the digital capability to do their jobs better yeah so hey wouldn't be great instead of you just spending all this time husbanding and doing all these things and moving them along wouldn't it be great if you actually got a chance to look at it and say hey boss or hey whoever wouldn't it be great if we looked at it this way and now those those those things and again this is coming from industry this is not me inventing this industry's already been doing this they've already enabled citizen developers to go out because those business units are doing it themselves they're improving their app so if you're in sales the sales people's they're increasing your thing as they come across there getting off the old prem old old old prem servers is another opportunity is there something that's and on a server that you have to maintain that you can move over to a cloud based system and i think was it five and a half times reduction in some like i think netflix or something like that a huge reduction when they went to full cloud in terms of their cost uh and i think everyone knows what netflix does i realize they have a downturn right now but you know they were the gold standard of streaming for quite a while and everyone else kind of jumped on board and they were leading in they figured out how to do it cheaper faster better so that's where i would start i would look small try to do a small project have a have a plan of in this sprint we're going to build a beta that does this and this next sprint as we come across we're going to add this additional functionality and kind of have a map that goes through there realizing you may run into into roadblocks but ultimately if we got into what i would recommend if you're capable of standing up your incubation space you bring those projects on you're funding them for a year or two because if you're in our system two years out is about as early as you can if you get people in early enough to tell them the palm for their budget to take this over at the end of two years so bring them on let them grow and as they get further along and mature you kind of get some hands off while still providing some level of confidence if you have enough space licenses however you you build your incubation space you bring in other projects to grow and develop off of those things and then if they don't work at the end of two years or they don't have the money or whatever reason they just go away industry does this they bring in i think it's ten to six to one is uh ten come in six go to mvp and one actually gets to actually deployed yeah we can't do that in dod or any other government agency we probably have to a little bit better um uh maybe not one for one but bring in three and do two um to full deployment sort of he did that too is the we had really good success because they were engaged i mean the number of people that they brought who had no technical background now they did they brought some uh ip you know sailors who who could uh you know have the technical acumen to do it but a lot of people have to provide those to me yeah yeah exactly and but they had the buy-in they were committed a lot of digital transformations fail because really people just aren't committed they're not in it for the long haul and the chaplaincorp i mean they showed up and from day one they were they were involved they were in it and they're still continuing to be a part of it which is really really awesome and then to i think you one of your questions in there too was you know who should i work with um again well for this sort of uh escape if you're in the navy you go right to innovation solutions services under mlb that's who you go to if you're navy marine corps they are the people you go to i had a draft of a playbook i gave to them um they're going to be able to do it because they're funded and one of the biggest enemies is bureaucracy so they're straddling between the legacy way of doing business and this new way of doing business and they're still we're still figuring that out as they go through and as they bring in more projects they'll continue to do that but the um we can't get away from the bureaucratic way of doing business because of our palm processes because the way we consume and buy things there needs to be some kind of a change in my opinion i have no control over it i don't think anyone is call unfortunately has control over how we consume and buy things if you do please change it make it easier if if i had my way i would have service now for the navy and as i bring people on they just buy into my overall tenant so instead of this group buying this service now this group buying service now this group buying service now we buy it once and we just as we bring people on they buy into the same um environment uh and they just we just add more licenses so we start getting economy of scale i think that's a and you want to work with someone who will do that with you over sorry oh no no that's great and i think there is an element to this that we don't ever talk to touch on really which is going back to peo digital and sort of how they're doing this that i don't think a lot of other dod agencies do which is a single ato to rule them all with at least within the confines of servicenow's gcc having that as you know a central belly button to kind of capture all of the ato requirements manage that effort as a single set really reduces the amount of cost and energy and time to do it so in in conjunction with what you're talking about sort of like this enterprise level um agreement of of services and being able to just onboard customers as they come on another part of that is having a single ato there's there's pros and cons and and there's definitely lessons to be learned but i think from a efficiency standpoint it's a much better approach than everybody trying to go out and get their own individual atos to manage it all um turning to the hackathon yeah it's a hackathon so one of the big lessons learned i alluded to on that one was if i could if i could go back in time and from what i've learned since then um we were trying to get some pro dev again to my earlier statement about low code isn't no code you do want some some pros pro dev uh support as you go through there um we went through a trusted thing we were trying to go through icf which is a service now um i don't know what you guys call him a gold partner yeah uh but you can go through whomever i'm not trying to advocate for any specific platforms not my role um but the uh we were going to go through icf and i would have if i could have done it i would have had them on board much prior to the hackathon and definitely right after the hackathon as we continue to learn and go through things because uh travis y toca who is my technical director has been hands on keyboard doing a lot of java code uh to make things happen and doing a lot of um technical program management as well as sysadmin and other sorts of stuff that we would have the icf folks doing where he could then just provide more oversight operational strategic oversight of where things are going how things are working uh rather than me coming in everyone's like hey did you guys think about that like uh because it's it's easy to get focused in on the task you're doing you really do need someone who is kind of has a bit of a vision a technical program manager and someone who can really understand the technicals of how things work inside the platform um so that would be one thing the other thing i would do is i would send a few people from the group you're going to have come in through training beforehand um yeah we ended up spending a few days on the front end of a five-day workshop doing that training but it had they come in we would have been we would have been walking vice crawling at that point not only that then you can have a meeting with them to help shape what you want that hackathon to achieve and what the rest of the plan because they'll be much more familiar with that so i would bring in some ringers like i did with the it's um who could figure it out on the fly they know enough of the technical background of things to where they could add value i would have brought more people in to plan the hackathon and subsequent gates of what we were trying to get through to have a better plan excuse me that was more executable uh as we go across there so i would have the pro dev support i would have some of the citizen developers who were a little bit more trained uh than just complete neophytes i would still bring in a bunch of neophytes who have just an interest in making it work because that's who you really want to get in there because they're going to help you fix it break it fix it again and really give you good insights that you weren't thinking about because as you go through the process they're going to say wouldn't it be great if it did this instead of this because this makes more sense a guy like me who doesn't play in that space wouldn't know i'm like sure sounds great can we do that absolutely it's an out of box functionality or you go the the technical people who understand servicenow can go hmm that's probably a little bit too hard you know good idea let's add that to a later thing so i wouldn't make my schedule as hard and fast coming through the hackathon i would have a rough beyond hackathon but see what you learn in the hackathon as you start building your development teams and i would have more people kind of help show shape that out and make sure that the beta comes out a little bit cleaner we didn't have to do a lot of cleanup just because we just haven't had enough oversight of different groups as they split up the work and i would have been better if we had some um mission owners who had servicenow training embedded with each of those different teams as we split up the work but for me i we went with what we had we tin cupped our way through it and um pretty happy with with what we could prove and that was really the biggest part of it and i'm just thankful uh again here comes another uh chaplain sleep pun they had a lot of faith and patience with me uh going through this evolution because at the at the end of it they know they're going to get something it may not be exactly in the timeline we want it because again i'm limited in what resources i had we begged borrowed and uh we didn't steal but we appropriated uh things that um things that helped us move along uh and then i think we had another uh we talked about acquisition and you know what i think is important though in that last note that you said too is um you did it right a lot of people it's they try to they try to do the hundred percent you know they plan for the 100 solution what you did was you went out and you executed and was a perfect no was it pretty no but you learned and you you did that iterative approach and you just you were willing to accept that there are going to be times where hey we're not going to totally have this figured out but we're going to figure it out as we go maybe that's the aviator side of you but that was really instrumental i think in pushing a lot of this along is just the willingness you know that willingness to fail and and learn and move forward and never look back and go you know yeah we could have waited and we would have solved this differently but we still wouldn't have been we wouldn't have started the execution today you know had we been trying to just plan it all along um so it's a big big component to digital transformation is just taking that step and doing it yeah and i i'll echo this from the vice chief uh with the national implementation framework he is very much into learning he understands you he wants he wants what your plan is he comes in and so this is really you know i i've been amazed and and all my fruit reps are signed i'm retiring so i'm not this is me sucking up to the boss if he ever sees it uh the vice chief but i've seen him and this is kind of the reason i'm sharing this is this is top-down attitude of learning patience understanding that we're going to fail in certain aspects but failure isn't failure is only fair if you don't learn from it right you're going to have things go wrong things are going to be what you thought they were going to be but you got to figure out why how could you have done it differently and what are you doing to not repeat that problem going forward and that's really to what an organization needs to be it needs to be from the top down as you said support i was willing to do this bottom-up effort mostly because again what they couldn't do anything to me and we promised the chaplains we were going to help them so i wanted to really follow through on that um i i wanted to i hoped it was going to prove out that we should be able to do more of this and get more groups who are disadvantaged with they don't have technical know-how they don't even know where to start and start opening up ideation portals get people to come in and cue up all that information to help me figure out from what's the value to the enterprise what's the value of the organization what's the cost benefit as you look through all the different ways of balancing out which projects to bring on next that's where i want it to go but ultimately understanding in an agile sort of fashion you're going to learn because you're going to run into things that didn't develop as you thought or whatever reason it didn't come to fruition as you thought it would and you have learned from it and it's improved your product but you do these in smaller fashions you do these in sprints as you go through more much more of an agile process rather this monolithic 100 a year later you get this thing and it takes you two years to clean up the mess you can do things with smaller sprints fail early or learn early i guess is probably the better way to say it learn early because when you fail fails got a bad connotation you learn early make those changes so as you go forward subsequent sprints are better and so you start branching off into different areas but if you're in a similar sort of vein of what you're trying to work on future sprints become that much better as you go forward learning early learning fast final final thoughts on before i go into any questions that are posted online um are there any takeaways that you have you guys have transitioned this over to the innovation support services and noelle shots team what are the things that you see on the horizon that other dod agencies trying to execute the same sort of philosophy what are the things that they'll need to consider to be able to sustain it for the long haul you are you're going to need some programmatic know-how uh on your team you're going to need some people who are people like me who have a passion but aren't necessarily technical but have a vision so you need people who have an enterprise perspective people who have your smaller kind of operational and people who have this very tactical perspective all on your team who are doing this type of work you need to have your visionary your what if people the people who like me who were when i was a junior officer running around beating my head against the wall saying man wouldn't it be great if um to help be that that vocal champion who can also then help translate to people who are outside that group what the value is to them so you kind of you need a little bit of all that um you do you want some technical program managers you need a technical director or a tpm at that level as well to understand the technicals of it you need the money people you need the contracting people so you need that you need to have that bureaucratic team until unless your organization is able to get around that but you're still going to need technical people you're still going to need that visionary that communicator um and go through that that was one of the other things i would say is public affairs part of the reason we got some support for the chaplet corps is the public affairs piece won the day we weren't great at it because again small team me and and another another dude or two um trying to pull this all together and kind of tin cup our way through it had this again mostly to prove that you could be done yeah you know to do this in a much more deliberate fashion in a sustainable way it's just that i think incubation space is is a way to think about it to bring people on projects you fund them with your licenses that you buy at the enterprise level you know you buy enough to bring bring in people incubation space i think having space in most low code applications so you got service now you have salesforce you have power platform we have appian i think pega is coming through now um there's uh the honey code i think in amazon google sheets in google um just to make sure i hit all the big ones that are ato'd uh i think you're all 82 now but looking for those systems and figuring out which one works best for what i'm doing and then as you go through you're gonna develop patterns or playbooks to figure out what works for different types of business units um you know and i say business units in a very generic way some people are more operationally focused some people are more business focused some people are acquisition folks whatever whatever their role is um will depend on what you implement and what solution and how you do it and then the best part is as you start doing more of them you start being able to lift the lift code flip it over and really shrinking down timeline for newer projects that come on so you can say hey i can bring you on maybe next year but i'll be able to get you through in 12 months instead of 24 months which again sounds long when i say that that's more of a programmatic teaching people how to maintain this themselves and to pay for it themselves as they come out the back end unless your enterprise is willing to bring people on and continue to buy licenses which i think we should but realizing that um that is going to be a challenge that could overcome that is in my opinion the best way to go if you're able to do that yeah we buy all the licenses we want we figure out the value of the people we're bringing into these different platforms and we bring them along incubate them teach them how to maintain and govern our own stuff and then we kick them out the other side and we occasionally check in on them and you have a portfolio of people who who are experts in certain areas as you grow your unit out so you have someone has maybe oversight of several different programs um in a certain environment or a certain platform and then that way you have you start building your team out so people aren't lost i'm not trying to make this a gigantic government oversight program i'm just trying there needs to be a little bit of oversight and guidance because they're going to come in and it's going to be government purchased whatever so there has to be some form of government oversight especially of if you're bringing in third party support contractors like icf or all the normal integrators deloitte that we use allen whomever to come in and do that kind of work yeah and you need definitely a contract that supports the flexibility you know we added line icf added line items for if additional surge capacity should happen and just giving some government flexibility to it because one of the longest polls in the town is the contracting actions associated with it all um i'm gonna go to a question here on the silly uh mauricio uh kuto i apologize if i'm butchering the last name asked did you build your apps using servicenow scoped application or purpose build application csm itsm or using now platform capabilities uh general capabilities well i kicked that over to you alex what do we use i will take that one um so we did we would we built wood scope for the chaplain core we built a scoped application so it was not csm or itsm we call this sort of our purpose-built out-of-the-box uh applications we used what's called app engine to build a custom custom application kind of put the guard rails on what they wanted to accomplish allow the mobile mobile ability of it and those types of things so um it was all we're leveraging is is now platform capabilities nothing uh nothing unique just we put a wrapper on it of a specific application we called it the rmac yeah welcome and then the other question from a coast guard uh guest matt ster is there a visual of the complete workflow that all stakeholders may see so that they may see one where they are in the process and two is the workflow on track to meet the deadlines um i will say we didn't use a workflow for that hackathon and sort of where we are in the project however with the modernization effort going over from uh from mo and the opnav dto into the innovation support services one of the things that they're focused on is having that ingest point and then managing that effort through servicenow so that you will customers and stakeholders will be able to see uh where they are in the process what the process even looks like assigning tasks back and forth automating some of those things like mo talked about you know some of the requirements hey do we get training done so these those are types of things that we can add into part of the workflow and then how soon do we expect this to finish you know some of the agility side of it it's hard to put necessarily a a deadline on things but you usually want to try and have an mvp by a certain point in time and then the uh the the sprints and stories that you're doing uh the sprints that you're doing to execute against that you're trying to keep it in front of whatever that deadline is but they tend to remain somewhat fluid um so matt i hope that helps answer your question there and i think that's it uh mo as always it was a pleasure to have you i really appreciate this because you're leading from the front on something as as you as you depart the pattern you're leaving the the navy in a better spot than it was before um and your experiences hopefully we can broaden the horizons of a lot of other dod agencies that are doing this so i really just thank you for thank you for putting yourself out there to make this happen thank you for being willing to share uh your lessons learned and uh and we wish you all the best of luck as you transition out you come to the other side of the fence brother it's a fun time and um and we'll uh we'll definitely have to have a whiskey on the other side of things so i really appreciate it and i thank you everybody for joining today and thank you for the marketing team ashley and holly for putting this all together and uh we wish you all a great friday and a wonderful weekend