The Sea Warrior Program, within the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), is supporting the Navy Recruiting Command (NRC) through a contract award for up to $65 million to modernize key information technology systems.
The new Recruiting and Accessions Information Technology (RAIT) services contract helps lay the IT foundation for Recruiting Force 2020, a strategy that relies on agile, paperless technology to recruit quality applicants for America’s navy.
“The RAIT contract award is an important next step toward realizing the Navy Recruiting Force 2020 strategic plan of ‘anytime, anywhere’ recruiting,” said Kevin Sullivan, NRC chief information officer . “One of the first orders of business will be an IT solution to replace today’s manual process for recruiting and accessing enlisted and officer active and reserve candidates.”
Currently, the NRC Officer Programs are managed using a paper-based process for both active duty and Reserve across 14 officer program categories, each with a unique set of candidate qualification forms. As a result, NRC’s 38 officer program managers maintain stand-alone spreadsheets on their specific programs. In addition, roughly 147 different candidate forms are managed separately by the Navy’s 26 recruiting districts.
“The PRIDE Mod [Personalized Recruiting for Immediate and Delayed Enlistment Modernization] Increment II will change the manual application process into a data-driven process supported by electronic forms. As a result, we anticipate the error rate for officer applicant processing, which is now around 35 percent, to decrease dramatically because of better data quality. Also, the time to enlist an applicant or commission an officer will be shorter, reducing the chance we’ll lose good candidates due to a lengthy process,” said Sullivan.
Under the RAIT contract, selected applications and systems will be migrated over time to a more flexible, interoperable solution for today’s mobile and agile Navy recruiting force. The RAIT team has initially identified nine legacy systems for modernization and integration into several Web-based applications built on a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Examples of these capabilities are recruit marketing research and analysis, applicant medical waiver review, and investigative data for applicant security clearances.
“The SOA-driven approach lets us leverage current applications as ‘services,’ thereby safeguarding our existing IT infrastructure investment,” said Laura Knight, program manager, Sea Warrior Program . “The SOA has already proven effective for recruiters in the field who now have a Web-based capability that enables a faster, more automated process to seek and admit future Sailors into the Navy.”
[mappress] Naval Today Staff, January 16, 2013; Image: US Navy