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Business Intelligence: Legacy Systems Obstruct UK MoD's Supply Chain
Today’s modern military depends increasingly on technology, technology for weapons, but also technology to manage business intelligence and the supply chain.
A report from the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) finds that military technology has been a weak link in military campaigns that the UK has been involved with in Afghanistan. Technology changes at a blistering pace, and many of the UK’s Military of Defense (MoD) IT systems have been frozen in time. The report notes that the MoD’s supply chain to manage the storage and distribution of materials and supplies “falls short of general logistics industry best practice.”
The report highlights areas considered to be problems:
- Old systems lacking many features now standard with newer software
- Poor quality and accuracy of data
- Systems are often incomplete and data is incompatible between them
A large amount of MoD supply chain data is maintained in IT systems that are 30 years old. The rerport notes that “these systems have limited capability and the scope to upgrade their capabilities is often extremely restricted, and many are no longer supported. Reliance on such systems means that it is very challenging to produce the business information required by stakeholders to run an effective and efficient supply chain.”
A single item passing through the MoD supply chain may need to be referenced by up to four different IT legacy systems. Relating data on that item between the systems is a manual process.
The report notes that the MoD supply chain system has reached the point where the risk of catastrophic failure is very high, the failure of which could have a major negative impact on the ability to successfully support the war effort.
The findings of the report are a bit of a black eye for IBM. The IBM Cognos BI software is core to much of the system. The report faults insufficient data being populated into the system and also the fact that the software was not as effective as it should be, commenting that “the Cognos tool does not always pick up the correct data when producing reports.”
