Modernizing Navy's HR to Empower Sailors

The U.S. Navy’s global dominance stems less from its ships, aircraft, and submarines than it does from the sailors who operate those weapons systems. Unfortunately, the Navy faces increasing headwinds as it works to recruit and retain our nation’s best and brightest in an increasingly competitive talent market.

Recognizing this, in 2015 Navy leadership embarked on Sailor 2025—an ambitious transformation initiative centered on sailors and their families. This initiative and its three main pillars—personnel system modernization; ready, relevant learning; and career readiness—will enhance culture, modernize technologies, streamline processes, adapt policies, and provide tools to ensure the sailor’s hire-to-retire experience becomes one that supports recruiting and retaining the right force, and provides the career choice and fulfillment needed to accomplish the mission. Within the personnel system modernization pillar, a cross-disciplinary team of Booz Allen experts is helping the Navy improve how sailors and their families access essential human resources (HR) information technology (IT) and support.    

MyNavy HR is the Navy’s organization responsible for recruiting, developing, and distributing sailors. Though the Navy has been successfully recruiting sailors, retaining its workforce, and manning its ships, the Navy’s information technology (IT) infrastructure is outdated and unsustainable. Locating travel orders, identifying career advancement opportunities, and utilizing training resources can be daunting endeavors for sailors and their families. With our help, more than 50 disjointed IT systems are currently being consolidated and optimized to create a congruous platform that is widely accessible, intuitive for users, and more efficient. It’s an enterprise-wide IT modernization effort.

Booz Allen determined early on that a quick-fix solution was the wrong approach. To meet the Navy’s long-term needs, MyNavy HR would have to orchestrate a comprehensive and sustainable IT modernization. To help accomplish this, we’ve assembled a cross-functional team that includes data scientists, human-centered designers, Navy subject matter experts, IT strategists, enterprise and solution architects, and others. Working hand in hand with the client, our team is bringing strategic guidance, technical vision, and an integrated Agile approach to MyNavy HR’s enterprise IT transformation. 

As part of our integrated Agile approach, we’re helping MyNavy HR embrace human-centered design and Agile practices within its IT development process. This includes engaging hundreds of sailors, clerks, and system administrators in collaborative modeling sessions that explore and document the processes, systems, and data that Navy personnel use every day. By identifying pain points and ascertaining process efficiencies, we’re creating a better end product for sailors. Through this research and solution development process, we’ve helped reduce administrative costs by more than 18 percent within the Reserve Forces management arena alone.

The strategic direction we’re providing for MyNavy HR includes building out a comprehensive IT system shutdown schedule and capability standup schedule to ensure that efforts to transform in one area are supported end-to-end. Originally, MyNavy HR measured its IT modernization progress on a system-by-system basis, neglecting the full scope of services that the organization offers. We proposed implementing a unifying taxonomy (a common language) that is enabling technical IT needs to be tracked and addressed in a more coordinated and measurable manner.  

In the area of technical vision, we are designing and implementing modern technical architectures and a cloud-based platform as the foundation for MyNavy HR’s IT modernization, while aligning multiple vendors and parties involved in the process. We’re exploring the technical challenges and opportunities associated with providing HR support through mobile applications and while sailors are at sea, and building a fully native cloud platform that provides a responsive web experience for users and leverages natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to improve user search functions. 

As a result of our collective efforts, sailors and their families will be better equipped to take control of their careers, and the Navy will have more effective and efficient tools to attract, engage, and retain the best candidates through an intuitive self-service model and a secure mobile environment.

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