3.2: Starting with Data

12 miles, not for a road march, but just to tell the army what it already knew. Author’s photo, 2020.

You make a lot of decisions as a commander. In the military, it’s the defining characteristic of the job. But no one really checks your math to see why you chose what you did. You can just go with your gut, or with ‘the way we’ve always done it’, if you want. I decided I wanted to be data driven wherever possible. This required setting data as a priority from the start. For me, this opportunity came as I was doing the first thing we all do when we arrive to a new unit: in-processing.

In-processing is not to be confused with onboarding. Onboarding is when you learn unit SOPs, who’s who in the zoo, and the rhythm of the organization you just joined.

No, ‘in-processing’ is that annoying test of your patience where you walk around to dozens of different offices and give them data the army already knows about you, along with a printed copy of your orders — hoping to god it’s not your last copy. In the army, it’s the mirror image of ‘out-processing’, which you also do every time you move. They’re two sides of the same PCS.

Back in 2020, on my way out to Okinawa, I managed to get in 17,198 steps in a single day just trying to clear post clear Fort Bragg.¹ Add in the 7,396 the second day and you get a total of 24,594 steps. That’s roughly 12 miles — about 20km for everywhere in the world but the US and Myanmar — which means we could make clearing post one of the events to earn the Expert Infantryman’s Badge if we wanted.

I was just walking from office to office to get signatures on an out-processing sheet, often for services I didn't use. I had to go to the on-post housing office to clear, despite the fact the army already knew I lived off-post — they were paying me my stipend for it. Then I had to go to the on-post bank to confirm I didn't owe them any money for the on-post utilities for the on-post house I wasn't living in.

Even if the office did apply to me, all I was doing was telling the army what it already knew about me. For the travel office, I had to hand write in the names, birthdates, and DODID numbers for my wife and kids so we could purchase their flights.² Except the army already knows I'm married. It knows my kids’ names and when they were born. It has all of their DODIDs.

The army has all of that data in multiple places. None of the disparate offices that ostensibly exist to help soldiers are connected to each other, and so there's a ton of wasted time as soldiers go from office to office filling out all the same information the army already knows, usually by hand on a clipboard. You do this first when you depart an installation and then again when you arrive at the next one a few weeks later. Telling and retelling the army everything it already knew about you before you even got packed up to move.

I just completed yet another PCS a couple months ago. There’s been zero improvement in this process since I joined the army over two decades ago. Back then I had a flip phone, but in today’s smart phone connected world, it baffles me there isn’t just a QR code that I can hold up to a scanner at each stop to verify the data they already have on me. There’s nothing confidential, or a HIPPA-like reason we don’t do this. We just don’t.

So, as I arrived in Okinawa back in 2020, the first place I saw an opportunity to set a new data-driven standard was the first staff shop I walked into: the S1. S1 is the home of all things admin in the army, and I was there to pick up my in-processing checklist. The clerk handed me a clipboard with a couple dozen pages of paper for me to fill in by hand. Minus a new address, it was all data the army already knew about me. I had to repeatedly write my name and DODID number atop each page. What was my rank and when I was last promoted? Was I married? Did I have kids? Was I airborne qualified? What other schools did I have? All the data I'd built into the company tracker I'd made for Ryan years ago. And all already in army systems, some if it in multiple systems. Yet here I was handwriting it onto a piece of paper over and over and over again. The new battalion S1 captain hadn't arrived in country yet, but when he popped into my office to report in a month later, in-processing was the first thing we talked about. I couldn’t change the whole army’s systems (yet), but I tasked Bryan with getting our in-processing checklist into digital forms that could be filled out online.

Bryan's team got the entire packet ported over to a PDF pretty quickly. This came with a lot of benefits. First, it no longer required a soldier in his shop to transcribe all that handwritten information into a database.³ The clerk could instead prefill the forms with some of the data we already knew before the soldier arrived. The time savings were great, and once input as data we could easily port it around. Another benefit was when a soldier left, they could take these PDFs with them. This meant not having to constantly repeat filling out the 20-page death packet every time a soldier moved.⁴

If the army's systems had good APIs, we'd have been able to automate even more, pulling just about everything we needed from existing army databases. It'd be simple for the newly arrived soldiers to just confirm their data, only needing to update the information on the margins like address or phone number if they changed.

Which makes you wonder: what could the army do with all the human workforce currently dedicated to transcribing all these clipboards of handwritten notes into data? PCSs are always a time of stress for families, even when they are going smoothly. Army garrisons employ a sizeable work force to manage in- and out-processing, but very little of it is data-driven, and most of it is redundant. If we could improve our data fabrics at these bases, we could free up this workforce of thinking humans to do more complicated tasks, ones that would genuinely help families navigate these transitions. Speed up changes to pay, actually find services for new families that need them, help transitions into new schools, or ensure spouses have everything they need to minimize a break in work. There’s really no limit to what a couple hundred human beings can do when they aren’t just being computers.

Bryan's team in Oki did great work in a short time, and with no code and no budget. They sped up the process of onboarding new soldiers significantly, while saving his section a ton of time to focus on things that needed real human work. And perhaps even more importantly, when a new soldier showed up to the battalion, their very first stop introduced them to an organization that valued data and expected them too as well. Nothing beats a good first impression.

1. Now named Fort Liberty.

2. A unique ID number for all military servicemembers and their spouses. It’s the perfect index number to connect up data in disparate army systems, which of course is why we don’t use it as such. IPPS-A opted to give us all an additional one.

3. As someone with atrocious handwriting, I always feel for the poor clerk who has to try and read my chicken scratch.

4. One of the most annoying things you have to fill out is the 'death packet'. It serves a necessary purpose and details every question that could come up if you unexpectedly die. But repeatedly filling it out every time you move can be frustrating, given again, very little changes besides your address.