When the new Army Chief of Staff wanted the mountains of paper off his desk, it was up to Lt. Col. (P) Michael Gilligan and his team to find a way to automate headquarters’ systems. Little more than a year later, the project is now its own office \u2013 Army Enterprise Staff Management Systems, or AESMS \u2013 with plans to have all of Army HQ paperless by July.<\/i>When was the AESMS office first stood up?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The office was stood up in October 2016, and that was a result of our efforts in implementing a task management solution to the headquarters department of the Army. And in our efforts with HQDA, a lot of the other Army commands and organizations subordinate to HQDA started coming to us seeking similar solutions to what we’re providing, and as a result we had to establish a project office to manage all those requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
HQDA identified a capability gap with task management. Prior to us implementing the task management tool for them, they were leveraging a technology-based tracking system; however, they were still using the blue folders to manage all their correspondence, as they were routing them through office to office for the various levels of edits, reviews and concurrences. The capability we\u2019re providing them digitizes the entire process from the version control of the documents, editing of the documents, to including digital signatures for the final product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It eliminates the personnel walking down the hallways and eliminates the stacks of papers. And it provides real-time feedback on exactly where the document is in the process and who actually has it at that time. Senior leaders can look and query that at any time and figure out where things are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n