The Strategic Corporal
The Strategic Corporal is a metaphor that was developed in the late 90’s by then Commandant of the USMC – General Krulak.
It typifies the every day soldier, sailor, airman, airwomen, and civilian within a defense organization – in commercial language, it’s the information worker. These individuals – in their day-to-day activities have the ability to impact the outcomes of larger operations – or endeavors. In other words… they are today's Corporal Radar O'Reilly of the popular American TV show M*A*S*H.
Today at home these strategic corporals have access and use extensively the latest technologies & collaboration tool on the internet, whether playing online games writing blogs, collaborate, access information via RSS, placing orders at vendors such as Amazon, or through on-line auctions at eBay, participate in Second Life, MySpace, flickr, YouTube… all with no training, no user manual… and do voluntarily testing of Google applications on the web ...
On the other hand, these strategic corporals experience a dramatically different environment in their professional world. They have to work with systems sometimes older than they are with table driven User Interfaces and coding and hardwired processes from the early days.
To be empowered our strategic corporals need access by any device to understandable contextually relevant actionable knowledge to be able to make the decisions they have to make.
A Costly Mistake
In my air force days, I observed a mechanic with the rank of a sergeant, making an unconscious procurement decision for a main board of a Tornado black box. He was saying to himself that “it’s broken – so I need a new one” not realizing that he kicked off an 200 K procurement and put an aircraft out of service for quite some time. If he had known about actual lead-time, cost, and alternative options, I bet he would have decided differently. I suspect you have many more examples like this.
Making Strategic Corporals Agile
How can we live up to the expectations of these strategic corporals? The technology seems to be there. They are immersed everyday when off duty and logging on.
Last week at the 9th Focused Logistics Conference at RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute in London, the keynote speaker raised the question – “how come a soldier in Iraq can order the latest DVD via Amazon with guaranteed delivery within days with 99.9 % certainty, and at the same time wait weeks for a pair of new boots” ?
Dr Alberts & Hayes made the point in Power to the Edge: “Agility is arguably one of the most important characteristics of successful Information Age organizations. Agile organizations do not just happen. They are the result of an organizational structure, command and control approach, concepts of operation, supporting systems, and personnel that have a synergistic mix of the right characteristics.”
Waiting weeks for the boots is certainly not agile.
For a start lets discuss if a specially tailored portal – a supporting system - could provides access to understandable ( pictures and/or maps ) contextually relevant actionable knowledge.
A picture says more than a thousand words;
With little effort, the strategic corporal can determine the Readiness of the weapon systems of his 3 Batttery, 255 Armored Artillery Battalion, the tanks with a red bumper number are not ready, by a simple mouse click he can go into the details and see all the defect reports / squawks on the tank, its progress in maintenance and take the necessary action to ensure that the mission has the greatest chance of success.
This may be a way to achieve agility …
Looking forward for your thoughts …
