Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems

Decision Support and Business Intelligence Systems

Walter Reed Army Medical Center:

“Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC-2005)”

Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) is a maturation process to re-align, consolidate, and facilitate the transformation of DoD resources. As a result, BRAC programs and its decision results have some interesting characteristics that make achieving that objective a unique challenge.

BRAC is a business strategy that has been designed by DoD to reduce costs while maintaining or improving existing services.

The need for decision support system (DSS) comes where there may be a gap that exists in an organization’s information resource management scheme. This gap is a clear indicator that lack of information may compromise the effectiveness of the changes for an organization during a BRAC migration.

At the operational level of a typical organization information needs to be gathered and exchanged into a data warehouse for top-level management to create a business strategy plan.

Moving resources such as IT equipment from one base to another can enable organizations by increasing their business efficiency by upgrades to their equipment and saving space and cost by reducing the footprint of the organization.

However, it can be time consuming and expensive if not handled correctly. A BRAC move needs to choreograph with set goals that synchronize people with supporting information. The organization should carefully manage the level of changes, expenditures, structure and time constraints which will be executed by planning, forethought, and backup solutions.

BRAC should also consider the total environment; addressing the data, infrastructure, operational, organizational (personnel), and logistical issues that will affect this migration.

This paper will provide a basic introduction to the BRAC challenges during the IT phase of the realignment. It discusses BRAC change management issues, technologies and the automations available...