The more things change ...
... the more they stay the same.
I'm in Virginia for my old command's "Industry Symposium", and it's amazing how little has changed since my departure last year.
Gen Lance Smith, USAF, Commander of USJFCOM (as well as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation) noted USJFCOM is "the only interagency combatant command." At least until Africa Command is formally stood up in the coming months.
Even though the complexity of USJFCOM's "social network" is growing exponentially (the biggest change was the inclusion of more collaboration partners in their dialogue regarding force providing, training, integrating and transformation), only now are they looking for tools to help them manage such a complex mesh.
Labels: jfcom, tech_transfer, transformation
3 Comments:
"Even though the complexity of USJFCOM's "social network" is growing exponentially..."
Managing complexity is going to be a critical variable for getting a Sys Admin type force to work.
I'm reading Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife and from the Malaya case study it is clear that the agency integration fostered by Gen. Templer increased the effciency of a very complex system by simplification as well as integration.
Continually adding complexity will eventually break a system's back.
Great point, Mark. I think the biggest challenge USJFCOM faces is focusing its immense energies on a few specific tasks. The lack of accountability, coupled with the meteoric growth of the command in the past few years, has allowed some poor business practices to take root.
In minting, we have seen an absolute explosion in challenge coin orders in just the last few years, as everyone orders more and more self-specific coins. It used to be a command or unit coin was all that was "needed" and the batch order was in the thousands. But now we get up to a dozen different coin orders out of a given unit - with a batch often being as low as 225.
And I'm left wondering if the perceived need for progressively more specific coins is a response to increasing complexity AND a symptom of lack of successful integration.
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