APIs turned the Armed Forces' IT into a retention tool

Military IT is complex: from legacy systems to operational security, there are a host of challenges to navigate.

It's not all about ballistics and logistics, either: the British Army is a huge organisation, and bringing all its systems together is no easy task.

"Integration is a dry subject. Certainly when I'm when I'm talking to the military people, those steely eyed dealers of death, integration doesn't go down well with them. They want things to happen, and the underlying piece of integration is always seen as 'Yeah, just get on and do it'," says Richard Williams, integration lead at the British Army, speaking at a Software AG event in London this month.

The Army might think it's very different from a traditional organisation. After all, what high street bank, retailer or e-commerce giant can boast tanks, warships and fighter jets as part of its capex? But at the end of the day, data still underpins everything - and that was a real problem until recently, because getting systems to talk to one another was a laborious, time-consuming process.

"We'd got ourselves into a position where we had a large number of legacy IT providers, providing everything from our HR to our equipment systems, and we'd become beholden on them. They pretty much ran the roost. We'd go to them, they'd provide us the user interface, the data warehousing, and they'd look after our data for us... and then they provide all the analytics tools."

The Army was stuck in a position where it had to keep paying its IT providers to access its own data or do any sort of analytics. And, because the data was spread across multiple siloed systems, that ended up costing a huge amount of time, too.

"That's a world many of us will recognise," Williams quipped, although in other ways the Armed Forces are very different to a normal office. For example, access to official military computers is not easy to come by: if you're not an officer, you're probably queuing to share a PC with 30 or 40 other soldiers. That meant even simple tasks, like leave requests, took an inordinate amount of time: in fact, there was still a reliance on paper forms to avoid wasting time in a queue.

"The fact that we end up queueing with a bit of paper to go and ask about two days' leave is ridiculous, and it doesn't wash with the modern generation."

"Disjointed and complex"

As an example, Williams discussed two systems: HR and equipment, both of which sent information to a data warehouse before it was consumed. Before the recent changes, the team manually fed HR data in every day, but the equipment data - used for all the planning and reporting - arrived from the system provider on a CD once a month, and it took three weeks to clean the data to the point that it was usable.

"The data we were using was the best part of two months out of date all the time... Imagine trying to do your equipment planning on data that's the best part of two months out of date."

The solution was in APIs, enabling the different systems to talk to one another automatically and in real-time; but getting there was not an easy process. In fact, the transformation is still ongoing.

The first piece of solving the challenge was changing the equipment feed to a daily one, using Software AG's Universal Messaging product. This meant the information was up to date and more realistic, and as a bonus the project forced the Army to work with the software vendor to improve their data, so it was usable when it arrived.

"They were happy to play ball. The cynic in me would say [that's because] we're heading towards re-contract...but either way, it worked to our advantage."

It was a good first step, but still meant the systems were dependent on the data warehouse. "That's not an ideal situation to be in for your transactional data," Williams noted.

The answer was in an API gateway. The Army already had one for its own applications and systems, but it couldn't handle information from other sources; adding that ability was a game-changer for serving personnel.

"That, at a stroke, enabled us to put applications onto soldiers' personal devices for them to do stuff. We cracked that whole problem of them being able to get access to information. Sailors - when they arrived in port and they all get off [their ship] and want to go and get on a computer and book leave - suddenly they could just do it on their phone as they were coming into port."

Originally the Army used a robotic process to pass the necessary information between systems, which Williams admits was "disjointed and complex." Adding APIs into legacy systems, again via Software AG, is now helping the Armed Forces to modernise their backend tools.

"Before we brought these [APIs] in, you could go into My Series [the relevant app] and put in a leave claim, the robot pushed it back into the HR system, and it's not actually back in the data warehouse for 24 hours, 48 hours. So you're sitting there looking at your phone going, 'I've booked leave but it's not saying anything, all it's saying is 'This will update at some point in the future'.'"

We are allowing the Army to move to the nirvana that is evidence-based decision making.

Williams believes API gateways are the future of military IT, while the data warehouse will become a store of information used for historical trend analysis. The core systems will feed off the central API, and all future applications will be built API-enabled to support that.

That's a big change from the past, when APIs were built specifically for "niche" requirements. There was almost no incentive for personnel to ask the IT team if they had an API for something, because in most cases those general-purpose APIs didn't exist. Now that they do, developers can build applications faster and there is more trust in the data their apps use. As Williams puts it, "We are allowing the Army to move to the nirvana that is evidence-based decision making."

Navigating this transformation in an environment dominated by legacy systems, and during the stresses of Covid, has not been easy, but it has been worthwhile. Williams says it has been a "huge, huge change" for the defence sector, but also "hugely positive" for serving personnel - to the extent that the Army now views its integration as a retention tool, for having removed many of the negative aspects associated with its IT in the past.

The work hasn't finished yet; the integration expansion is set to continue, and Williams admits it has already meant "lots of work - and ‘lots of work' would really like a bigger team; and we're still waiting for that."

Maybe the Army isn't so different from a private enterprise, after all...