There are a lot of reasons why it takes more than two years to build the annual Defense budget. But one of them is the fact that DoD’s acquisition systems and its financial management systems don’t talk to each other — at least not very well. That’s a problem the Pentagon is starting to solve though as programs big and small begin to coalesce around a common lexicon, and officials are hoping for some big management gains thanks to that added visibility.

The new approach, called the Centralized Unique Program Identifier (CUPID) is a partial answer to one of the key problems the Congressional commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) identified in its final report: DoD’s complex and aging web of business systems doesn’t make it easy to share information about how the budget is being executed across different parts of the department, let alone with Congress.

CUPID was meant to help tackle that problem specifically within the department’s acquisition and sustainment bureaucracy. Until recently, officials didn’t have a good way to match authoritative execution data from all of DoD’s weapons systems to “program elements” – the individual line items that make up the Defense budget.

“We only had authoritative data sources associated with the biggest programs, which do represent about 88% of the spend, but there are thousands of other programs that are key, and we need to have insights into those as well,” Mark Krzysko, the principal deputy director of enterprise information in DoD’s office of acquisition data and analytics said during a forum hosted by George Mason University last week. “[The CUPID] data standard is applicable and can be used, although we did not mandate it, all the way down to an investment level. What we call it is kind of the birth certificate for programs. We don’t argue when it occurred — whether they’re going to high school, whether they’re going to college, but we know the program exists.

More granular uses of acquisition data

DoD started using CUPID for acquisition data all the way down to contract line item numbers earlier this year, when the department implemented a new rule requiring contracting officers to tag each reportable action they take on contracts with the three-digit CUPID code that contract supports.

And in theory, every program in DoD now has one of those codes, because program managers are now required to register them in the department’s Defense Acquisition Visibility Environment (DAVE).

“What does that do? We can now rethink our insights based upon having some traceability within the acquisition community, relative to the comptroller, relative to the sustainment communities, relative to the Joint Staff and requirements,” Krzysko said. “We create a stronger base, and we can reenvision what’s taking so long. That information serves us within the acquisition and sustainment community by and large, but it also serves other communities. It helps the [chief data and analytics officer], who’s looking at much bigger problems … it can help the comptroller as they prepare the budget justification books. As they manage their data sets, they can see our view of the world. It sounds like a very technical and geekish kind of maneuver, but it will be profound for us.”

Profound, Krzysko said, because that level of granular data, combined with Advana, DoD’s still-evolving data analytics platform, will give the department the ability to see the acquisition system as a whole — both the forest and the trees.

“And seeing it gives us some insight as to what we might want to change. Do we need to refine our policies? Do we need to refine our trainings? We need to get out of the mindset of just following processes,” he said. “We need to exploit the data we have and say, ‘What are the obstacles?’ And that requires a change of people, and data and analytics. The techniques that we now have are profound for us to better have insight and guide the department, and those that execute need to have that same mindset.”

Major challenges remain with DoD resourcing data

Still, tagging data differently within DoD’s existing systems is only a small step toward where the department needs to go, according to the PPBE commission.

One of the panel’s primary recommendations was for the department to create one common platform for detailed resourcing analytics across all of its budgeting and planning functions. The commissioners acknowledged Advana is a very good start – with more than 400 data feeds now streaming into the platform – but they found there are still some significant shortcomings related to usability, searchability, and data access for the people who need it.

But Yousra Fazili, the chief of staff to the DoD comptroller, said that’s not because of an unwillingness to share data across the department – something she says the CUPID effort highlights.

“We don’t have so much of a data issue as we have an enterprise problem,” she said. “I think CUPID is kind of an amazing initiative, because what it does is have our systems talk to each other. We kind of do have an agreement about what the data is, so then the question is, well, how come we have this mismatch? For example, we had a big [presidential drawdown authority] misevaluation for Ukraine. The problem really came down to an enterprise problem of us not having systems that talk to each other from acquisition and sustainment, from the comptroller, and from policy. So it’s a people problem and an enterprise problem. CUPID is set up to be a way that people can search or access data in the same way.”

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