In today's rapidly changing world, the skills of U.S. soldiers and veterans needed to thrive after their service ends is ever evolving. With only 50% of U.S. veterans saying that they have the skills to prepare them for the transition to civilian life, the Army was faced with the critical task of building a digital platform to support training and education opportunities for soldiers and veterans. The Army chose Liferay as the modern digital experience platform for its flexibility and mobile solution architecture.
Rich Savage: Thank you for joining us today. This is Rich Savage with the Liferay Team at Carahsoft. And I'm here with Raj Iyer, managing director at Deloitte to talk about the digital transformation being done by Deloitte and Liferay to support the U.S. Army's of voluntary education system. Raj, thank you so much for joining us virtually today.
Raj Iyer: Thanks for inviting me.
Rich Savage: Of course. And to get us started, can you walk us through some of the main challenges the army is trying to solve?
Raj Iyer: Absolutely. So first I'd like to maybe take up a second to talk about the background and the context for why the army embarked on this very important mission. As we know, the U.S. has the most advanced army in the world due to the incredible men and women in uniform who help protect our national security and maintain peace. These men and women in uniform make sure we maintain our competitive edge overseas and in turn, as a nation, we need to make sure that they're successful while they serve in the army and thrive, once their service ends. In a rapidly changing world today, the skills our soldiers need to protect our national security and the skills that they need to succeed when they transition out of the military, are constantly evolving. Given the size and caliber of our army, investments in skills can actually help build a pipeline of talent to fill a larger workforce shortage that the nation has.
So here's a couple of examples. About 47% of the jobs in the U.S. could face possible automation over the next 20 years due to rapid changes in technology such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and automation. By 2021, an estimated 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled. And by '22, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 9 million STEM jobs will go unfilled as well.
On the non-technical fields, about by 2030, we're expecting a huge shortage of about 160,000 truck drivers in the United States, which would critically undermine the supply chain in ability to move goods.
Our service members drive actually very sophisticated, large vehicles and machinery to geography that's far more challenging than the typical interesting highway. But unfortunately they're not able to tap into these jobs after they leave service because their military training does not help them qualify for a commercial driver's license. So despite the potential though, the Army's learning infrastructure did not always support a very clear alignment between military training and skills and credentials needed for similar roles in the civilian workforce. In fact, many U.S. veterans say that the military prepared them for active duty, but only half of them say that they felt prepared with the right skills to transition to civilian life. That makes it actually critical to provide education and training opportunities, for both maintaining their competitive edge while they are in service, but also providing them marketable skills and credentials to succeed when they transition out of service. With these objectives in mind, the army actually made some sweeping policy changes recently to allow soldiers to more easily tap into credentialing and certification opportunities, through army universities, agreements with thousands of commercial vendors and colleges worldwide.
However, the army needed a new digital platform to support the new credentialing assistance program because the legacy system that was in place called GoArmyEd was not able to quickly adapt to changing policies and procedures. The army wanted to provide a digital experience that soldiers can use to find the right college courses or certificates, and enroll in them consistent with their career path. The army also wanted a system that is very flexible in being able to quickly accommodate policy and process changes. And most importantly, for the system to be accessible from mobile devices so that soldiers could access the system from anywhere in the world, wherever they were deployed.
Finally, the army wanted a new system that was far less expensive to operate than the legacy platform while taking advantage of modern technologies, such as cloud native architecture. So they're in this kind of the genesis for how the system called ArmyIgnitED, came into being. And I'll talk about that here in a second.
Rich Savage: Excellent. Thank you, Raj. And can you tell us a little bit about the software evaluation process and what stood out about Liferay?
Raj Iyer: Yeah, absolutely. So the army enlisted Deloitte about a year and a half ago to develop ArmyIgnitED, the new system to support creation and credentialing assistance to replace an existing outdated platform. To support this priority, Deloitte developed a flexible and mobile solution architecture, built around the needs of lives of soldiers, enabling them to obtain marketable skills. And the army NetApp platform provides quick and efficient access to both in-person and virtual training and voluntary education programs to improve military readiness soldier retention and successful transition to civilian life. We work very closely with multiple credentialing vendors and training providers to ensure that the system was user-friendly, while collaborating with army education counselors to incorporate feedback to better support soldiers through their counseling process.
So, today soldiers can sign up for over 1,500 credentials through the system to help advance their career goals. The types of credentials are quite varied all the way from pilot private license for single engine aircraft to certifications like BMP and CISSP and also commercial driver's license certifications. So, in terms of how Deloitte went about implementing and selecting the product, we first conducted a very thorough assessment of the functional requirements as part of our proposal response. The army had two constraints in the solicitation. The first was that it needed to be a COTS product. The second was, it needed to be a COTS product that was approved by the army. And so that narrowed down our choice of products to a much smaller number from what might be available in the commercial marketplace. Although, while we did a number of COTS products, none of them had the capabilities to deliver all of the requirements for the system out of the box.
And many of them actually needed extensive customization. And this was one of those core design principles that Deloitte actually was not in favor of because we wanted to build a platform approach that was flexible and scalable, without having to overly customize the system. So Deloitte actually recommended a platform approach as part of our proposal, one where we could benefit from many of the pre-packaged, out of the box components, but also one that will give us a flexibility to configure and customize the parts that were army unique. In addition, Deloitte wanted a platform, even though this was not in the solicitation, we wanted to build a platform that was cloud native in terms of its architecture, and one that would easily allow us to upgrade in future so we could support the client with a continuous modernization approach. And another criteria that we added again, which was not in the government's requirement, was to make sure that we prioritize open source software to reduce licensing costs to the army.
We all know that government clients spend a lot of money on software licenses today and the scale and scope of what open source software provides today in the marketplace. Many of them are comparable to what other products might be able to offer. And so it was important for us to take that into consideration. Liferay DXP was the only product that checked all of these boxes, including, being on the Army's approved products list, which made it easier for us to integrate it into their data center environment, to meet all their cybersecurity requirements. In addition, Deloitte had already previously implemented two other protocols using Liferay DXP, and we had the necessary skill sets internally to staff the project with the right trained and certified resources. So at the end of the day, this was an easy choice to make, but also the right choice to make for the army in terms of meeting the requirements for the platform.
Rich Savage: And that's great. And we all know the best software in the world still needs to be implemented properly. What approach did Deloitte take to ensure a positive result?
Raj Iyer: Yeah. Deloitte used a scaled agile framework called SAFe for the implementation to deliver a minimum viable product quickly. It was important for us to show rapid progress in terms of how quickly we were able to turn on the system rather than taking an extended period of time that's typical of most DOD implementations. The first module that went live was for credentialing assistance. And that actually went live in June of this year. This system has been receiving raving reviews by soldiers. Soldiers like how easy it is to navigate through the system without the need for any training and quickly find and enroll for certifications. Because the system replaced a very manually intensive process that required a lot of forms to be filled and emailed, soldiers are seeing a huge difference in the experience.
In addition, the army counselors located in each of the army garrisons worldwide who provide education counseling to soldiers, have been thrilled with the product since they're now able to see all of a soldier in one location. So it makes it much easier for them to interact and are able to guide and counsel the soldiers in terms of their career paths. The army works with over 2,500 schools, colleges and universities, as well as training providers and provides education offerings to soldiers. And these organizations have welcomed the new system because of the business process re-engineering that Deloitte implemented to streamline and simplify the onboarding process for providers. Finally, soldiers are able to access an army system through their mobile phones and their experience is on par with what they would expect from a consumer app. And this is unheard of in the army and then Deloitte and Liferay are spearheading and pioneering that kind of architecture and that solution for the army.
Rich Savage: And what does a roadmap look like for ArmyIgnitED?
Raj Iyer: Yeah, despite the successes we've had with version one of the product that went live, we are actually currently implementing version two of the product and that is scheduled to go live early next year. And there are several new capabilities and modules that are integrated into version two. Most notably, it's going to have the full tuition assistance module for soldiers, and also be able to process scholarship payments for ROTC cadets, and also offer training for army civilians and interns. The next version, when ready and complete and deployed, will in a sense, be ready to sunset the current legacy system when it's fully deployed around February of next year. Also, in addition, the system will have some much needed functionality for army education centers to manage their workload and process soldier actions. Because of this kind of diverse nature of processes, a platform approach, which is what Liferay DXP offers, provides us the greatest flexibility in meeting such a diverse set of processes.
Deloitte is also integrating a separate card CRM solution with Army United this year that provides tier zero self-service support and ability to escalate cases within the system to handle exceptions. So when fully deployed early next year, the system is scaled to support over a million users worldwide and support tuition payments of over $600 million a year. So, that is not a scale that a lot of systems can do today.
Concurrently, we are also exploring migrating the system to an army approved cloud environment.
Rich Savage: Wow. That is truly amazing, Raj. And before we wrap up today, anything else you'd like to share about the experience?
Raj Iyer: Yeah. On a program with such a critical importance to the army, Deloitte needed a partner that was actually committed to the program success. And from that perspective, I can say, Liferay has been a great partner to work with on this very complex implementation. We engaged with them very early on in the assessment phase to fully understand the product capabilities and the flexibility it offers. The cloud native microservices architecture and the support for open standards is very compelling. Liferay has also validated our technical architecture in the design phase to ensure that it was scalable, and it took advantage of all of their out of the box capabilities. The Liferay University online training has been very helpful to our developers. We were actually able to rapidly bring on several new Java resources and have them be fully functioning in the Liferay environment within a couple of weeks.
And finally, the army loves the fact that they don't have to pay huge costs for software licenses. That is a huge percentage of large army systems today. And instead, are able to refocus and reprioritize that funding towards building more functionality into the system and providing a better experience for the soldiers.
Rich Savage: Well, Raj, this was great. And thank you again for your time and all the insights and information. We really appreciate it.
Raj Iyer: Thank you so much.
Rich Savage: Of course. And for our listeners, you can check out additional resources here on the podcast landing page. Of course, you're always welcome to contact us anytime at Liferay@carahsoft.com. Thank you again and see you next time.