Organizational Technology Integration Within the Texas National Guard

Organizational Technology Integration

The Texas Military Forces (TXMF) is an organization comprised of over 200 individual sub-organizations, with over 24,000 members. This workforce is comprised of approximately 19,000 traditional National Guardsmen (training two days per month, two weeks per year), and a full time force of over 5000 members. Technology requirements to support both the full time and traditional force are dispersed across 268,000 square miles and 147 separate facilities, each with varying degrees of technology infrastructure.

Ensuring a common communication platform is difficult and routinely problematic at best. Integration of technology across the enterprise has not always addressed the needs of the workforce, nor the limitations of selected technologies, resulting in frustrated communications, loss of services, slow service performance, and a focus on the lowest common denominator in technology to provide organizational level connectivity. This paper addresses the integration of technology within the organization and its existing shortcomings, identifies a quantitative methodology for problem identification and proposes a model by which the organization can evaluate its efforts to integrate technologies to improve performance, and a scorecard to support high level decision-making. Finally, a series of recommended best practices for integrating technology to best support the organization follows.

Problem Expansion

The Texas military Forces provide a suite of communication technologies to keep the full time workforce connected to achieve the goals of the organization. Technologies, such as public and private web sites for information sharing and collaboration, Microsoft Outlook Exchange servers for email and file sharing, Web-based Outlook Exchange server for remote email access, dedicated data warehouse servers for data storage, Blackberry cell phones for communication and data transference, Dell computers for every full time employee, and an intranet infrastructure to connect the various solutions together are provided by the organization to its workforce. An additional requirement of a government IT system is to protect the public trust and property, which can necessitate an ultra-conservative approach to IT solutions. Lanham (2003) identified a few points to consider for government IT systems, including matters of privacy, property rights, due process or protection, constitutional compliance, integration between state and federal resources, etc. Taking these perspectives into account, there still exists a disparity between what is ‘required' and what is ‘possible' regarding the IT infrastructure of the TXMF.

Each of the technology solutions are not optimized to neither available alternative technologies, nor the needs of the workforce. As an example, the Outlook Exchange servers that are hosted, serviced