COLOGNE, Germany — The German defense ministry has kicked off a lengthy process of remodeling its digital operations and business processes with the aim of making the armed forces, or Bundeswehr, more combat-ready while streamlining back-office operations.
Under the banner of Enterprise Architecture Management, or EAM, and armed with a freshly awarded contract to the ministry’s own information technology company BWI — one that will ultimately grow into €180 million ($187 million) over 10 years — officials are fanning out across the agency to catalogue how data travels through the vast bureaucracy.
The idea is to look under the hood of all moving parts, documenting processes that range from guiding missiles on their targets to assigning military hospital beds to injured soldiers.
The insights are meant to generate a blueprint for a new way of doing business, streamlined flows of standardized data and all. In essence, it’s an attempt at cutting through the fog of war — literally and bureaucratically — and unearthing hidden interdependencies that will ideally ignite proverbial light bulbs on doing things more efficiently.
“We’ve always had architectures in IT, but they were isolated,” said Col. Ralf Blasajewsky, who is charged with laying the EAM governance groundwork on the Bundeswehr’s planning staff until the program gets its own subdivision office in April.
The idea of connecting the dots of previously disparate processes stems in part from a report by government auditors that lamented the lack of data interconnectedness, Blasajewsky said in an interview.
In response to the charge, he added, defense officials decided to start “something big” — a comprehensive digital model for the entirety of the military apparatus, neatly sorted into functional compartments.
While the work is meant to yield new insights into the operations of the defense ministry, there is also the objective of facilitating joint operations with Germany’s other security agencies as well as with allies.
When it comes to the vision of Germany as a central European logistics hub for NATO forces in the event of a major war, for example, officials believe an über-model of government models could do wonders in gauging the requirement for, say, grub for transiting troops.
“If there were 150,000 American soldiers to march through Germany, there has got to be a baker who delivers the Brötchen,” said Blasajewsky, referring to the mini breads popular for breakfast here.
The spirit of the EAM approach is more advanced in some communities than others. In joint fires, for example, practitioners have always had to deal with data flowing across the various elements of what officials call the “kill chain” — everything from sensors finding a target to warheads striking it.
Building out the modeling approach even further for artillerists could help leaders understand existing capability gaps — a cannon with a particular range, for example — and derive acquisition strategies, Blasajewsky said.
The integration of drones into combat formations would also benefit from an EAM examination, he argued.
As defense officials get started with their modeling work, they are finding that specialists are hard to come by on the labor market. That is because the EAM discipline is also en vogue in the private sector, under the industry modernization mantra known here as “Industrie 4.0,” according to Blasajewsky.
He said the success of the project will depend to a great degree on how the tenets are socialized in the department, ideally with support growing from the lower echelons of the service branches.
“If we dictate it from above, it won’t work.”
Sebastian Sprenger is associate editor for Europe at Defense News, reporting on the state of the defense market in the region, and on U.S.-Europe cooperation and multi-national investments in defense and global security. Previously he served as managing editor for Defense News. He is based in Cologne, Germany.
