Office of the Secretary of Defense Streamlines Innovative Readiness Training (IRT) program

Windward Abstract
Challenges

The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Innovative Readiness Training (IRT) program utilizes a legacy custom-built ServiceNow application to meet stakeholder and customer needs. Due to the custom nature of this application, functionality needs to be developed outside of the normal ServiceNow configurable capability set. This requires many code-based customizations to align with the customer’s vision and provide the capabilities to fit this unique program.

Windward created a solution leveraging ServiceNow's powerful app dev and portal-oriented capabilities to meet customer's preferences.

Solutions

Windward’s solution works seamlessly with the larger solution developed by our partner LMI for the original application. The customer wanted as little interaction with the backend platform as possible, so Windward created functionality in the ServiceNow portal to allow community applicants representing private, youth and charitable organizations, government entities at the federal, regional, and local level, U.S. Armed Services IRT program managers and directors, and other business partners to accomplish their goals of generating, selecting and executing on IRT missions. Windward created a solution leveraging ServiceNow’s powerful app dev and portal-oriented capabilities to meet customer’s preferences.

Results

Developed and implemented Mission Budget tracking application, including the processing of OSD requested funding, approved and received funds, periodic funding adjustments, returns, and transfers.

Automated creation and tracking of funding adjustment (type) information memos by service/component and external budget application codes, to be sent to OSD for approval.

Redesigned the IRT portal to align to IRT branding, improve navigation, and enhance search capabilities.

Windward added knowledge base functionality for self-service application guidance, IRT process and Platform information for community members, program managers, and other business partners.

Implemented ServiceNow Incident and Change Management capabilities to replace pre-existing manually run processes.

Automated for maintenance of the externally hosted IRT Mission calendar, integrating via specific notification to update based on important date-related events occurring on mission records.

Automated the generation of “touch letters” that are sent to the government stakeholders regarding missions in their districts/states. Letters are generated and scheduled based on important mission dates, and an external integration was created to maintain the Congress member data.