Public Sector Institute

Right near the “Red Entrance” across from the Dave & Buster’s in the Franklin Mills Mall just off I-95 in Northeast Philly is The Army Experience Center (AEC).

According to its website, “The AEC serves as a 21st century destination for people to get accurate information about the Army directly from the source. Conceived and built over a ten-month period, the 14,500-square-foot technology and education center is fast becoming a model for Army recruiting nationwide.”

However without Cloud Computing, the AEC wouldn’t have 21st century technology to power it, said the Army’s Major Larry Dillard in a recent interview.

Major Dillard works in the Office of the Assistant Secretary Army (Manpower & Reserve Affairs). “We have oversight for the Army’s marketing budget,” Major Dillard explained in a recent interview.

During 2007, he was on a team studying the effectiveness of Army marketing and recruiting and tasked to come back with recommendations.

Skunk Works

“What we did was establish a Pilot program to implement commercial best practices into Army marketing and recruiting,” said Major Dillard.

The Pilot took one recruiting company with 30 soldiers in North Philly. It was small scale with not a lot of users. The plan was to start from the ground and re-envision the way the Army does recruiting.

It entailed doing a ‘soup-to-nuts’ look at process and technology and use it as kind of a “skunk works” to innovate and come up with better business practices and tools that could be used throughout the rest of the enterprise.

“This wasn’t about Cloud at beginning or Salesforce.com (the solution used)”, said Major Dillard emphatically. “It was all about solving that business problem.”

“We made the conclusion our homegrown IT system wasn’t up to the task of effectively managing our marketing and recruiting business,” explained Major Dillard.

The homegrown system was developed to replace an old paper based recruiting system. So basically it automated the paper-based process but wasn’t optimized to capture business intelligence and provide decision makers the information they need to make timely and accurate decisions.

IT was a key part of Major Dillard’s challenge. Needed was something that could be implemented on a very small scale with a modest budget and also provided enterprise level functionality.

After looking at traditional CRM and marketing automation solutions, we “came to the conclusion that the traditional model could not work on the scale we are talking about,” Major Dillard explained.

“It quickly became obvious that a Cloud based solution was the only thing we could implement on cost effective basis that would give us the functionality we required. Salesforce.com immediately came to the fore.”

Major Dillard explained the challenge is Salesforce.com is not DOD accredited. The AEC was taking what had traditionally been a homegrown IT solution hosted in government data centers behind the firewall and now moving that business process outside the government firewall.

“That was a big challenge for the AEC Pilot and will be an even bigger challenge should the Army decide to expand beyond the Pilot,” Major Dillard predicted. “This is the issue; it’s still out there and I think it is going to be the case for any government agency looking to implement SaaS.”

Functionality Please

Out of the box the Salesforce.com Cloud solution solved a lot of the challenges we have been trying to fix for years noted Major Dillard.

The problem is “we have this massive recruiting database; and we have a big problem of tracking individuals across multiple touch points throughout their experience,” said Major Dillard. He explained the Army has not been able to connect the dots between marketing efforts on the front end to get the recruiting outcome wanted on the backend.

With the Army’s current recruiting system, the Army has to write and test code and find a way to migrate data over a wireless network.

“Salesforce.com gives us a much a more robust look of an individual’s contact with us over time and it comes with built-in mobile functionality,” noted Major Dillard. “You install the app and you are done. The information – nothing sensitive – is stored in the Cloud and allows the Army an easier way of gathering data before you bring it back inside the Army firewall.”

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Major Dillard clearly believes the Army could be more effective if the Army adopts Salesforce.com and other applications like it.

“In the AEC Pilot, we are able to do email marketing campaigns and Facebook campaigns. We track how they heard about us, traditional broadcast media efforts, radio and billboards,” explained Major Dillard.

By bringing all that information in, it gives the AEC Pilot a much better sense of how effectively it is spending its budget.

“I am completely and totally convinced that the Cloud provides government users dramatically lower costs with significantly improved functionality,” remarked Major Dillard.

“We have been able to deploy new functionalities five, six, or seven times over a year. We can do this in 10 days, while many times it could take 4-5 years to do in-house.”

The AEC Pilot ends in August 2010. After that, who knows, Army recruiting may be really taking to the Clouds. ■

Profile AEC: Counting On The Cloud

Issue: The Army needed an innovative way to communicate its mission, values, resources and career opportunities to a new generation of Americans on a local level.

Strategy: A “soup-to-nuts” re-think to develop The Army Experience Center (AEC) as a 21st century destination for people to get accurate information about the Army directly from the source.

Action: Run AEC pilot based on the Cloud to test whether a state-of-the-art technology and education center can shatter outdated stereotypes, start new career conversations and become a model for Army recruiting nationwide.

Outcome: Pilot began in August 2008. In August 200 the Army will evaluate the program, decide whether to tweak, keep or end the pilot.

Learn more at www.TheArmyExperience.com.

Contact Jeff Erlichman at jefferlichman@publicectorcommunications.com.