Frontrunner Award: US Department of Defense

The International Panel of Judges has decided to honor the US Department of Defense with the Frontrunner Award in 2014. This prestigious “Frontrunner Award” is given to organizations that leads the pack and challenges conventional ways of thinking and working to move into new frontiers and pushing the boundaries of how to think, work and implement concepts. The US Department of Defense included in their project the organizations of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Department of State, Joint Staff (J6 and J7, U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Southern Command, and National Guard Bureau in recognition of their innovation and development of a Unification Framework.

The US Government has demonstrated thought leadership in challenging conventional thinking with the Unification Framework that enables:

• Any Government Department or across departments to unify common stakeholders and objectives, and to scope common mission critical programs and projects.
• Alignment and integration of joint initiatives.
• Achieving information sharing.
• Develop a set of core competencies and cross capabilities to support joint development in a prioritized and comprehensive approach.

The Alignment-Unity Framework was developed aiming to:

1. Unified common stakeholder, objectives and size common mission critical across complex mission and multidimensional warfare such as cyber, combating weapon of mass destruction, combating translation organization crime and security corporations.
2. Achieving information sharing unity of effort to meet national security US Department of Defense with the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Department of State.
   • Alignment and Unity Stakeholder Map.
   • Alignment and Unity QuickScan.
   • Alignment and Unity Maturity TCO-ROI evaluation.
   • Alignment and Unity Maturity Benchmark.
   • Alignment and Unity Development Path.
3. Alignment- Unity Framework Stages: Align, Compare and Unify.

With such a comprehensive “Alignment Management Concept” this concept uniquely recognizes that any department even though it has its own mission, vision, strategies and critical success factors is only one element of a bigger delivery and service mechanism. In nearly all cases the success of strategy to execution is dependent on the ability to operate in “alignment” and thereby “unity” with the rest of the organizations.

Today the Alignment Management Concept has been developed together with the US Government and LEADing Practice as an Enterprise Standard (Alignment & Unity Reference Content LEAD-ES60001AL). The Global University Alliance and LEADing Practice development team consist of:

• Business Transformation & Change Management responsible, Mona von Rosing
• Alignment & Unity Meta Object Semantics, Prof. Simon Polovina
• Information Management, Prof. Hans Scheruhn
• Enterprise Innovation, Georg Etzel

This truly encourages collaboration across departments, areas, groups that will enable value creation and realization. Realizing higher levels of alignment and unity requires however identification of common objectives and initiatives and standards. Something desperately needed, never seen before, has the US Government team developed within Unity Framework.

Standing ovation goes to the team:

• The Project lead, Ms. Angela Winter, Joint Staff J7, US Government
• The developers, Mr. Mike Tisdel and Ken Teske, Joint Staff J6 , US Government
• Mr. Martin Westphal, Vice Director, Joint Staff J6, US Government
• Mr. Stuart Whitehead, Deputy Director C5I, Joint Staff J6, US Government
• General Jon Thomas, Deputy Director, Future Joint Force Development, US Government