Vanguard Magazine

www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024 21 INTERVIEW oritizing those pathfinders or first movers to move forward? How do we move from ideation to development to delivery? Who does that? But I want to be clear on this. If we're looking at modernizing, we need to do that in a singular way, not four or five dif- ferent ways. We need to make sure that it's supportable. Bottom line is there's lots of work to be done in terms of the how, which is the difficult piece, but that work is ongoing. Raj Thuppal: It's also the customization. We tend to customize a lot of what we do to the specific business processes that we have, and we need to move away from that and then use what is readily available. And increasingly, most of these tools are avail- able in the cloud. So, your development time is not that much. It's configuring the systems to meet our needs, and then some- times it's "good enough is good enough" and we can stop there rather than reinvent- ing what is available elsewhere. I think that's going to be one of our challenges. How do we adapt rather than customize everything that we need? Michael Rouleau: Q I love that. Probably 80% of the supply chain can be industry best practic- es-centric because national companies do it far better than militaries ever could. But the last 20%, which is the contested logistics part of the supply chain, that's quite different and requires a certain amount of fidelity. So, love that point. MGen Dawe: One of the central tenets of the work that we do here at CCSI is coher- ence. We haven't always done a very good job of that. There's great innovation and initiative and we don't want to stifle that, but we just maybe want to provide a little bit of structure. And we strive for efficien- cies because at the end of the day, we know that we are working in an environment of constrained resources. Michael Rouleau: Q I'd like to talk a little bit about industry partnerships because it's im- portant to those reading this interview. What advice do you have for industry actors who want to help but find it difficult to break through some of your processes? Ross Ermel: I'll start off by saying we need to have industry partnership in areas where we don't have the expertise. If I look at the many functions that professional services in the digital space can provide us, such as systems and solutions integration, those are things we don't have the human capital for and probably never will. I enjoy having dialogue with industry in the digital space, having an ongoing dialogue of what's going on in industry, what's going on globally, where firms can help make me and make us a better cus- tomer. What's also important is that the three of us understand what core comPe- terncies we want to have in our workforce and build sustainable, supportable organi- zations going forward. Raj Thuppal: When I came on, one of the priorities for us as a branch was to build the partnerships with industry because we don't want to reinvent anything. We are not an R&D organization. I'm happy to copy and credit someone saying, "We took this from there." I think there is more we can do. Like I said before, we need to pivot to adapting technologies to our needs rather than do- ing the opposite. We need to stop build- ing, we need to be buying, we need to be doing less customization, more configura- tion. We need to do nimble, small stuff that can take us to where we need to be. That's where we are heading, and hope- fully that'll get us to where we need with respect to digitization. MGen Dawe: It's also time we embrace the fact that industry is leading the way in this space. There's no doubting the signifi- cance of the role that industry plays here. Having said that, I would just foot stomp the importance of interoperability. There must be an acknowledgement and accep- tance on their part that we have to priori- tize interoperability with our closest allies. I share that with our industry partners as something to consider. I also think the Joint Operations Fusion Lab (JOFL) being stood up within the Joint Forces Warfare Centre could serve as an innovation hub and perhaps help in terms of that interaction with our industry partners. Michael Rouleau: Well, gentlemen, I mean I feel like this in- terview could go on for hours. I thank you very much for your engagement in this space and I look forward very much to talking to you all at the C4SR and Beyond conference. It's been a pleasure. We need to stop building, we need to be buying, we need to be doing less customization, more configuration. We need to do nimble, small stuff that can take us to where we need to be. That's where we are heading, and hopefully that'll get us to where we need with respect to digitization. — Raj Thuppal

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