also worry about the cost effectiveness of the system versus hidden costs and opportunity costs for our panel today we're joined by the arm will mike the principal deputy secretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the part of the fence mr david fisher the director of the business  raises a new subject for the subcommittee the defense travel system while a topic may have monday you get a sense of the program's importance and you take into account the numbers that are involved currently the department of defense travel enterprise comes at an annual cost of twelve thirteen billion dollars designed to improve how the department manages travel modernizing travel processes maximizing efficiencies and lowering cost unfortunately it took too long for the program to stand up and run affectively i hope the days of being behind schedule and cost overruns are passed and it's my understanding that is much improved initiative resulted in the institute for defense analysis study that made a series of recommendations on improving the system but recommending an overhaul of the i'd like to hear from the department on their system which had previously been under the sponsorship in leadership of the defense finance and accounting service and it was largely at that point focused on the funds dispersement issue  so we inherited a defense travel system that you know had legitimate concerns were legitimate challenges and they were challenges affecting whether this is tim was meeting the user needs and user expectations clearly it wasn't there were concerns about the costs of the system and the cost of administering defense travel there are concerns about the technical approach that we were using  government develop software versus commercial off self applications and they are concerned about whether we get the benefits associate with such a major investment in an taxpayer resources so as valuable advice on how to get the department's travel improvement initiatives back on track and i'd like to say that we have willamette will implement all the recommendations of the hide a study  this hearing except for the recommendation that to d t l moses defense travel management office complete the fielding of d t s and we've left that responsibility with the military services but every other case we are moving out to help a mentor have implemented the haida recommendations so where are we now we are largely deployed stuff hundreds of eighty five percent of the sites that we're going to we have the tough ones that are left are small and they're distributed and they're largely garden reserve locations so that's a challenge that remains in front of us we are midway through my personal assessment midway through functionality the trip types the kinds of trips that d t s will cover so we're about midway through that about seventy trip types and we're about thirty of them now serviced by s i believe we have crossed the goal line for voucher processing that's paying travelers and paying the vendors and you wouldn't that's not surprising given that this so we have that's the furthest part of our journey that lies in front of us i do want to say then in summary that we are we have new customer center man and management for this enterprise in which you can have conference we have extensive stakeholder involvement we have he said per partnership with tar acquisition agent and developer business transformation agent and so i think in some way we're on course to successfully achieving the purpose that the congress establish for us to do sound chairman snyder congressman akin members of the subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to provide information on the progress the department of defense has made with the defense travel system two and a half years ago deputy secretary of defense gordon england stood up the business transformation agency the b a as a new entity chartered to guide the transformation of business operations throughout the department and to deliver enterprise level capabilities that align to warfighter needs in this regard the bta has a core portfolio of twenty seven i business systems and one of those is d t s the subject of today's hearing d t s provides duty military and civilian travelers with an end to end business solution that automates the defense travel processes e t s allows travelers to create travel orders validate authorizations make travel reservations receive approvals generate travel vouchers and directly deposit payment to the travelers personal accounts and the government charge card vendor for reimbursement the system went into initial broad based production use in two thousand and three and was transition to the bta for program management responsibility in september two thousand and six the defense travel management office within o s t p in our provides functional oversight and ownership of e t s and obviously has become a very close partner of ours in the b t s d t s program office and in response to customer feedback and feedback from studies like the ones conducted by the g a o it was clear to both the d t m f and the bta that improvements were needed in the d t s solution as it stood in two thousand and six while travelers were very pleased with timely payment of their travel vouchers they were less than pleased with the number of functional elements of the travel management portion of the solution that area became the focus of a major upgrade to the system that went into production a little more than a year ago with that upgrade the d t s reservation process was completely reengineered the reservation refresh which is what we called the upgrade resolved a lot of the issues that had prompted congress to mandate the independent study of e t s and those benefits were recognized by the institute for defense analysis idea in that march two thousand and seven assessment some of the things civically that id a noted that d t s as a result of reservation refresh provides the lowest cost routing consistent with the o t policy accesses a more complete airline flight inventory improves usability by pricing all flights as displayed grouping flight choices in the easy to understand categories securing reservations at the point of selection and providing potential for policy violation notices at the point of selection and its recommendations ideate determined that didio d o d should continue to use the reservation refreshed version of  and that it should be given a chance to work while additional improvements to d t s usability are pursued in the longer term idea also recommended that the u d explore a service oriented architecture or so of approach after the primary risks have been sufficiently mitigated now the result since the launch of reservation refresh have been positive usage of the tool continues to rise at almost exponential rate as can be seen in the chart to my right here in fiscal year two thousand and six d t s processed one point four million travel dollars in f y o seven that number increased to two point four million travel vouchers a seventy two percent increase and at the current pace d t s will process more than three million travel vouchers in f y o eight consistent with the idea report findings that the t m o and bta continue to plan for and add capabilities that will bring value and utility to the defense traveler and identify and implement improvements to usability and functionality to support the d t s economic model of maximizing transactions through the system for the ongoing d t s roadmap we'll examine the upcoming results of the d t about usability study and will augment the functionality with additional types of travel including special circumstances travel such as d t s the bta has taken some initial steps to address i d s longer term recommendation about soa on the pending release of technical refresh a software enhancement designed to improve the utility of the ts establishes an initial framework for this strategy of so approach breaks functionality into discrete services as a modular concept so allows identified services to be provided by either private sector or government organisations x program itself now interestingly enough d t s already incorporates a number of so after views in the existing solution but because so is relatively untested within the d o d and is not without some risk we're adopting a phased approach we consider additional opportunities presented by service oriented architecture bt is currently conducting a pilot design to test and thus mitigate risk associated with the maturity of the so infrastructure within the d o d working with the d t m o the feedback we receive from d o d travelers as well as from studies conducted by aida and others indicate to us that reservation refreshed has been a positive step we also know we can do more and we will continue to upgrade d t s based on additional feedback and business cases that will translate into requirements that we can build into the tool mr chairman we appreciate and value to support congress has given us over the last few years as we have established new governance and discipline to our business transformation efforts across the finding related to problems encountered by the department of defense and its efforts to implement the defense travel system my testimony today is based on our prior reports and testimonies from two thousand and five and two thousand and six and i will highlight three key findings we previously reported upon first the department did not have quantitative metrics to measure the extent to which was actually  information management and congress also because d t s officials were unable to identify the total number of travel vouchers that should have been processed as we previously test and they must be complete clear and well documented to design and implement and effective testing program as discussed in our september two thousand and six  thirty one million dollars in conclusion mr chairman as we have reported on numerous occasions overhauling departments business operations has been a daunting challenge and the travel management in accordance with the standard audit follow up policies and procedures will be pleased to brief the subcommittee on the status of the department's actions once we have completed our follow up efforts mr chairman disco's my prepared statement that was made for the record ok for my opening remarks now i simply want to tell you that i did took the task of doing this report very seriously we made the study as objective and as fact based as we could it was conducted by multi disciplinary team who were completely independent of the defense travel system and in fact at the onset had very little knowledge of d t s itself and i look forward to answering your questions about the report thank you thank you we think the clock is working here and we will all go by our five minute rule and probably have time to go around a couple of times we may have some votes coming up i have to ask mr fisher page a web service and able now allows the program the flexibility to further decompose the solutions into more modular elements and my only person here that has no idea what the hell that means you know we'd have to pull the group probably not what does that mean so the  concept that idea recommended for suing along the lines of service oriented architecture is a i think a multifaceted element of technology capability that has come along the way in the last  years fundamentally what it means is it provides an opportunity to instead of building something if there is a reusable service that is out there in the technology world today rather than you building it you subscribe to it which is one of the things that d t s already d t s did not build the global distribution systems or the software that we get from that actually manages the flight i'm in tori and  the pricing again the g d s is manage the booking the government travel card provider those are all extra services that d t s subscribes to but the idea study has recommended that we look at potentially leveraging other services that can be provided by other partners rather than things that we have built ourselves this technology that has come i think a long way in the last few years makes that easier the concept is not new the technology has gotten better that enables that flexibility now the challenge is to make that technology work requires a few things to be in place number one there has to be an existing service which is one of the reasons today why we have not pursued a service for the traveled management fortune of d t s because there is no other service today that provides the business rules in a in a service or a piece of software that the department of defense has to comply with so there is no other service for that piece of the ts that exists in the marketplace if there was we could take a look at it but there is you know we have the most complicated travel rules probably on the planet and we have a tool now that subscribes to these things that manager alignment torrie and things like that but we've built the piece that manages our own specific rules we have that we have a technology capability that could subscribe to such a service if one existed but it does not exist today the other piece that makes this kind of technology challenging for us is that it is based on standards technology standard and the d o d is also behind the times in moving to that standards based environment internally within the department that makes adopting this so of the service oriented architecture technology's very challenging minutes i guess i'll direct them to you and some specific things reports we've got bad weather where that's about your processing is much better people really appreciate the money getting through quickly but i have a series of specific questions it may just take a very short answer is one of the complaints we've heard and i've heard personally from people is they go online they get a flight also they make their choice and boom then they get a notice there's no government rates why doesn't the system and then they have to start over they have to go back some complex travel environments overseas environment for example where today you know you need manual help and so one of the things we're doing that's consistent with the idea study is to have a butt in d p s where you can push i get me help from the commercial travel office because i'm obviously in a situation that a simple software can't deal with largely and in broader terms we're looking at the usability of software how intuitive it is and how helpful it is and how responsive to yours needs and that review is ongoing now with lots of different users helping us think about how we need to revise and not being a user of the system or knowing anything about it before this morning or actually yesterday afternoon when so my staff put me on the system and all the thing didn't laugh itself off the table so i figured it had to be somewhat user friendly because futures and i don't mix very well used to sell him for i b m but i try never to use a but there were a series of different people that were users that we chatted with this morning and they had a couple of ideas  certainly a couple of them that appealed to me just because of the fact i've run into this kind of thing in other places one it would be nice they said to have a twenty four hour hotline where you could call if so we're going wrong and so he said well i have that well the trouble is you couldn't get through in any of the lines and the people that were users talked about being stuck in turkey needing to get a flight and they didn't really want to call the colonel at four o'clock in the morning in this hall because they had some political wisdom and then also it would be nice i suppose if there were a place where if there is a problem you can make a call to get in that was one recommendation that we heard the other thing that we heard apparently were places where there are a legacy systems that are not part of the current that are scheduled to be brought on brought in and i thought it might be helpful to know how do you evaluate which are the most important ones to but obviously you've mentioned that you have locations that you're going to bring up but also guys or users and they all said they didn't know of any one of them said there was one but you can't get on you can't get on it so it didn't do any good to have it if that is in fact case and they are right and we'll have to look legacy systems we see in this study in process now going through and identifying what legacy systems are out there by location what functionality they perform and and what would it take for because d t s fielding will be completed in fiscal year zero nine and then the functionality will cover the whole range of travel services by the end of fiscal year ten and so in eleven will be shutting down all those  legacy systems that all of them to do because once they do just travel some systems travel is just a side light of what they do and so we're going through the analysis now to be able to do that but nobody should be running  now ok so you don't know exactly which ones you're going to be serving next you know they're all aware i mean every installation has its own little unique solution to that to different services different agencies so we're going through that saying even some of it you spun off outside sources so you must be some plan as to which ones you're working on are moving through right of the internet functionalities different travel types yes that's what i'm talking about well for instance you don't have a place where if a soldier is going to be moved from one place to another for a year maybe with his wife and kids or maybe without you don't handle that kind of bring on stream the top two or three things that you're looking to put on most recently i think senator lott let me take that one for the record as well p c s travel the permanent duty travel surround the refundable tickets and the restricted tickets and if if i was trying to get a cook so i did and i wasn't you know i knew that i was a quick find it could still be within the realm of the restricted shares and i was having trouble with the system can somebody just look at their own flight and get a voucher later how does that work but just talk about the restrict   you know so there's certainly situations where there's not a u s flag carrier or u s flag partner there's not a city perivale call and in those kind of instances with the right approvals you  can get that's the kind of thing you need help from the commercial travel office and and they'll help you negotiate your way through that tor what i'm referring to though is if you know that the restricted fare is far less than the refundable fare and you know that you're definitely going to have to take this trip line to understand the opportunities that you have even within the system need another question really people have made a very strong case for and a lot been developed to respond to that need and to make sure everybody's doing what's right but sometimes we tend to legislate by exception i'm just wondering about the problems  who's traveling what their travel and where they're going on how they're making arrangements how soon they're making arrangements who actually completes the travel that they book so that business intelligence you can get now is really critical to supporting a review of th policy the prior policy said across the board don't buy these nonrefundable fares because too many of us can't travel when we plan to travel stuff happens in and we don't want to get the government you know left in for an empty seat so as a matter of policy we closed off that option as is standard practice and we are really looking at whether that's  the right policy for the future particularly with business intelligence as you get through through d t s so it's an excellent question now to see whether we're maximizing use taxpayers dollars whether we can be a little more flexible on some routine basis annual basis monthly basis and you've got this huge difference in the risk great to have versus the city pair fare or some other fare then we think it would be wise to take advantage of those travel and look at that systems development across state government one of the first things that we at g a o have basically talked about is that you need to take a look at your processes and your procedures and see if you can simplify those so that's one of the things that i would suggest that the agency take a look at and some of those roles and processes would require that come to congress and request for some legislation change because if you can simplify those processes it would really help this whole process and you could recognize a lot of benefits across different areas efficienc see if you can simplify it and get away from thirty some different forms of travel and see if you can get it down to a handful of possible but as i said it would require changes in policies and procedures as well as it would require some some assistance from the congress also in order to to implement this part of her five minutes thank you very much what travel is now a process th temporary duty travel through d t s we're probably about half fifty percent or so now but it will be by about sixty percent by the end of the year now there's other kinds of travel kind of things you know we as we add functionality we grab more of that travel as we get to more sites where d t s capability exists guard reserve travel when they're on active service that will pick up that travel and that's where we get to th calculation there was in fact the little green bar across the top the dodgers processed in zero six in zero seven and there was in fact a seventy two point four percent growth but then when i look at  the the graph itself there's a vertical green dotted lines and an arrow between them saying seventy two point four percent growth i wonder what those lines are because there's actually in excess of one hundred  partners mr williams just cited in his answer to question a moment ago so we're looking at that undoubtedly as we think about how you simplify this very complex  defense travel environment we will be coming back to the congress with some suggestions for how to legislation will need your authority to simplify the travel programs so chairman congress has passed legislation called live america that requires government employees to use american commercial carriers when it'll feasible choices by virtue of in forcing to the software statutory and policy restrictions with regard to defense travel and the so it should not be offering options in violation of fly america so it will offer options if you buy a ticket through united airlines for example and they book you on their united airlines partner for an overseas leg  that's easy that's complete compliance with fly america act similarly if you're stuck in turkey and you need to get out of there somehow and there's not a u s flag carrier or partner to do it  locations this can be a lot of money putting a burden on the traveler the responsibility to pay the credit card bills belongs to the traveler but sometimes the reimbursement from the government arrives up with the bill is due what today there's a couple of things the first is the ability to get travel advances so if you anticipate or your boss anticipated you'll be gone for a long time will get you in advance travel so that you o get paid so people are being paid in the three days from the time they submit a voucher through d t s instead of two weeks and longer if you can't if you haven't completed your m i'll take the first part of that and then mr dominguez i think can talk about the reduction of travel types our role is to accommodate those that are defined we have accommodated about half of the travel types to date as of two thousand nine the end of f y o nine o b two major releases in two thousand and nine that will add significant on the t t y and the permanent duty travel that will come into place in two thousand and nine which will get us up to in terms of number of travel types think above the eighty percent range and by the end of fiscal year two thousand and ten all of those will all travel types that are defined will be accommodated in d t s so we'll be at one hundred percent accommodating for travel by the end of two follow up that i'm talking about in the testimony is that whenever we make recommendations in our report we follow up to see if those recommendations have been implemented when do you anticipate doing that we will be starting that this late spring this summer to look at the report that's that's not one of the recommendations that we'll be following up on this would be something completely different yes this is following up on the recommendations in the previous report and testimonies of what they're going to be looking at any way we resist a minority member here so standby years ago i was hitchhiking through eastern oregon i came to a town so small that even a twenty four hour restaurant was closed you know that's a one liner that seems to me that's the situation we heard with regard to the twenty four hour hotline oh maybe the problem is there is no hotline is not the proper word you have there are multiple multiple contracts is there not an abundance how many secretary diminish to think of contracts we've got we've got  commercial travel organization are they provide they actually buy the ticket purchase a ticket provide the ticket to their members traveling and are supposed to support that member during that journey and  that they are all so they're also supposed to have after hours numbers to serve and we don't have good quality control and months of that script and part of what we're doing it's related to the centralization of distill two years from now or two thousand and ten you'll have all of the different means of travel embodied in the system does that include things like hotels and things like that as belzer supported today ok so then at that point now that you've got the system designed and running what's the ongoing cost to maintain it this it have just armies of programmers just to keep the thing up and running or is it pretty easy to not as big a group of people involved will drop into a sustainment mode at which at the time that we get full operational operational capability if new requirements pop in and that would be a variable sitting on top of that we've already brought down since the bta took over the program two years ago that operations  cost because we've streamlined some things from a management perspective and so we have both in our d t any element of new capability that we're adding any appropriation as well as the operations and maintenance which is the ongoing sustainment of  solution so i can probably get you the record a projection of what that number would be based on our budget estimates assuming no new requirements after that two thousand and ten years will always be little additional requirements and things coming going particularly if you redefine some of what you're doing which may make it simpler also i'm just trying to get a feel for the ongoing cost of the system in terms of volume of transactions be interesting to know that when you every time you buy a ticket that it's costing you you know ten bucks for the ticket just because the maintenance or maybe it's five or maybe it's to be interesting you know what that going cost is just the cost of having the system certainly i would assume that mr williams was talking about your  you know that's part of the purpose of simplifying it so that you don't have to carry as much overhead and things are plus it's easier to use and everything else it's a partner understand yes  enables us to get some business intelligence on that we don't now have to know we don't we don't know the baseline that's part of the study we don't know the baseline for how much it's costing us in terms of indirect cost to operate our travel enterprise today that's going to be captured in d t s in class and those where we can find things are going to go down it is simpler in cheaper now to process vouchers and get people paid then it used to be when you use d t y in which both ends of the travel are within the continental united states will be done by d p s why do you have to why does it have to get broken down ok the purpose is a temporary duty so it will be done by the t s a permanent change of station is that does kind of come back around to and i recognize we're all responsible for a program that started almost ten years ago now so it's taken we still the ten year mark don't have that kind of software developed where you can put the boxes as permanent change of station and it would the boxes yesterday when i went to my flight what rule would there be different for a permanent change of station like a person travel from fort benning georgia to paso texas what  cases even within for example d c s travel if you're a military member the entitlements might be x and if you're a civilian in time it might be why that's the level of detail that we need to account for that leads me to this issue of military  everything else would be done in the different manner and right now that's not how we use it sort of as a trip type in whole it's just that we do break it up for uniform personnel if they're going to a place that  people you talk to that once people understand the system kind of a fifty three ford pickup and it was the easiest thing in the world for me to drive because i drove it every day if i gave it to someone else they couldn't get it started never understood that but it seems like that's have we do have a lot of training and you're exactly correct it does take some training and it takes some practice and it takes using the system to be familiar with it and there may be an alter of all minimum that you get  trying to think through this in trying to design a system from a customer you point to that it's intuitive for them to do to you know bank through it the second thing we have going on is this simplification and look at travel as you touched on the overseas stuff i guess the only conclusion is it is a complex piece of domestic clear amplified when you start talking about overseas protective thought about going into war zones but they're using foreign but that's not available so you have to go on the phone to make those if they have a government issued computer or if they have a cat card reader that you can use on a home computer that enables the system to authorize or recognize you you can use the tool from home so when i bring my laptop home it has a card reader in it and i can access the d o d network that's ok but i can't use it on my home computer that doesn't have a cat card reader and and i actually what i think that and the new agreements with the there was a provision that each c t o was to take a look at that and we took that money and that's why we had a recommendation that you need to get this program to make sure that is done on a consistent basis across the entire operation than that commercial travel we in f y o seven spent a billion dollars in commercial travel two point four billion of that was process but i want to talk to you about sir the eight hundred numbers which we covered a little bit this differentiate between the technical assistance center and commercial travel that's after hours and we're working both of those problems for sure  travel and and there's many different ways to get them in including you know calling back and having someone endure a d t s on your behalf and file the voucher for you but one of the interesting things is that  is for you mr fisher to give me a summary of the business transformation agency and what all you all are doing and what you're involved in a relatively new creation and how many employees you have which budget but we were set up two and a half years ago we have two hundred fifty one government staff as of last count with about seven hundred odd contractors as well so about a little under a thousand personnel total  budgets in the three hundred fifty to three hundred sixty million dollar range we have to sort of think of our organization in two parts the part that does things like that we have a portfolio of twenty seven business systems  by definition the systems we own the services d t s is used by everyone dimmers the new military human resources and pay system will be used by all the services programs that are used by all services are the kinds of programs that we inherited if it's a navy specific program or an army specific program those didn't come to us so we have a portfolio of these twenty seven systems and they span travel personnel just six acquisition finance all the business areas the other half of the organization is more on what i call the guidance side the requirements side and so we have a group of folks that work very closely with the principal staff assistants the undersecretaries in the pentagon who set policy and really drive an enterprise level requirement we work with them to translate those requirements into something that can be implemented so we own our responsibility for the department's business enterprise architecture which is repositor rules something more complicated than that it says here the standards that we did department have decided we're all going to do the same do the same way so we have that responsibility to collect those requirements and put them in architectural form that people can use and then we work with our programs and the component programs on the best way to actually implement those in systems so in a way we're a conduit between the higher level requirements folks policy setting and the people who are actually implementing these requirements whether it's at the o s d level or at the component level we build that bridge in between to try to help everyone understand what those requirements are and best practice ways to implement them and then on the other compliance to architecture of those systems that are being implemented they come through a process on a on an annual basis to get review and we will take that process and we also do reviews of programs the larger scale component programs we assist the milestone decision authority the person has that ability to say yes you can go to the next step as to whether or not from a risk based perspective that program is healthy enough to move forward we serve different masters in o s d to try to help guide them on the health of programs and our ability to make progress and then we also help the programs that are trying to implement these enterprise standards get them to understand what they best practice ways to implement them if you had this position since the beginning i was with the organization from the beginning i was the first director named to the organization first permanent director and that position was staffed just over a defense travel system may be one of those topics that congress may on an annual basis with some regularity to look at particularly if we start getting into areas are you implying that we have areas that there may be needing statutory fixes so