The U.S. Army Accessions Command (USAAC) is responsible for recruitment efforts and matching newly enlisted and commissioned personnel with the requirements of the first unit to which they become assigned. Faced with the imperative to lower costs, the USAAC turned to Sun Microsystems to support its integrated portal and identity management solutions and its document management solution.

"The USAAC is responsible for recruiting -- from the first handshake to the first unit assignment," said Gary Bishop, Chief of Web Applications and Technologies for USAAC. "Our strategic goal is to provide the right soldier, at the right time and place, with the right competencies for that first unit of assignment. We looked to Sun to provide the technologies and services to help us better coordinate a wide variety of activities within the U.S. Army and with other branches of the U.S. Armed Services, as well as communicate and keep track of the status of a large number of potential recruits."

Sun helped the USAAC both to lower costs and improve efficiencies related to the management of more than 18 million records per year to track and store. Sun Services helped deploy a low TCO document management solution based on Documentum Enterprise Content Management running on a Sun FireTM 15K server connected to a storage area network (SAN) powered by Sun StorEdgeTM systems with utilization (SAM-FS) and availability software.

"To ensure well-designed development processes for each recruit, the USAAC has to manage information, and plenty of it," said Patricia Sueltz, executive vice president of Sun Services. "Sun Services provided the network computing expertise and technologies to architect and implement a consolidated storage infrastructure with the ability to scale as business requirements grow. We're now working with the USAAC to design and implement a portal solution with integrated identity management that will provision content and services to individuals and groups based on roles and privileges."

Results of the implementation to date are as follows:

• A projected 100 percent payback in 36 months through an estimated 30 percent lower TCO equating to $500,000 in savings

• An estimated 25 percent reduction in paperwork (an average of 150 documents for 250,000 potential recruits annually)

• An estimated 40 percent improvement in personnel productivity

The ability to store and retrieve up to 150,000 documents per hour and deliver up to 99.99 percent availability attests to the system's robustness. USAAC estimates that it was able to shave approximately 25 percent from its time to market with the assistance of Sun Services.

Encouraged by the success of the document management solution, USAAC then asked for Sun's assistance in designing and implementing an iRecruiter portal solution using the Sun JavaTM System Portal Server (formerly SunTM ONE Portal Server), Sun JavaTM System Identity Server (formerly SunTM ONE Identity Server), Sun JavaTM System Directory Server, Sun JavaTM System Web Server, and JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) technology residing on Sun Fire servers running the SolarisTM 9 Operating System (Solaris OS).

This solution dynamically provisions intranet and extranet portals, enabling the iRecruiter portal to deliver content to GoArmy.com. The heightened flexibility in changing and adding to content, USAAC expects this new infrastructure will play a major role in the enhanced brand and image USAAC wishes to promote. [...read more...]

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