Us Army

The United States Army is one of the world’s largest and most complex organisations. Its annual budget is over $100 Billion and it has more than 500 thousand employees in its active component and nearly the same number of National Guard and Army Reservists. The only way for an institute of this size to effectively manage itself is to have superior administration and logistics. The Army has largely followed industry in its processes relating to computers and information technology. In the 1970s the Army was using paper in nearly all transactions and a sizeable portion (perhaps more than ten percent) of its personnel was involved in a paper shuffle of this type. Beginning in the 1990s paper began being replaced with simple websites that performed one function and acted as ‘stovepipes’ because websites were inclusive and did not ‘speak’ or communicate with other websites. In the early to mid-2000s enterprise software began to arrive which meant as many as 50 websites were combined into one large website which performed all tasks in a functional area. The transformation of the Army from a paper driven slow operating juggernaut into a smaller information based or-ganisation has allowed its logisticians to deliver logistics to the battlefield in a way that would have been impossible to dream of even twenty years ago.
Like many large organisations the Army used to push paper as a way to track logistics processes such as maintenance records, supply issuances, ammunition requests, transportation movements, food orders and financial transactions. At least as far back as the ancient Romans and Greeks this process involved large amounts of written documentation on paper, parchment or other sources. Effectively, nothing had changed until the early 1990s in these processes that reached down to the user level. Certainly many larger companies had mainframes operating behind the scenes since the 1960s, but most personnel would not have seen these actions in their day-to-day...