Remember the Army recruiter
who set up shop behind some dreary desk at your high school? Getting the
attention of potential candidates for enlistment was a rather ho-hum,
labor-intensive affair back then. These days, however, the "cool"
factor in recruiting has been dialed up considerably thanks to video games,
full-scale simulators and, yes, even cloud-computing apps.
Take the Army Experience Center at Franklin Mills Mall in Philadelphia, a city where efforts have traditionally fallen short of goals.
The center is a 14,500-square-foot playground of sorts, filled with video games
and three full-scale simulators—including those for an AH-64 Apache Longbow
helicopter, an armed Humvee and a Black Hawk helicopter. For potential recruits
who want to take the experience deeper, the center has 22 Army staffers who can
discuss how the simulated experiences translate to real-life situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other global hot spots.
So where does the cloud
solution enter the equation? In the form of a customized Salesforce product
from Vienna, Va.-based Acumen Solutions. That’s because the Army needs to do
more than offer video/simulation bells-and-whistles with this effort. It needs
to improve efforts when it comes to tracking marketing and recruiting
strategies with the use of Web 2.0 technologies and customer-relationship
management (CRM) tools.
The solution allows
recruiters to analyze the center’s activity to see which simulators and video games
are most popular with individual recruits—helping them focus on specific
military roles that may be the best fit for a candidate. It can take
information gathered from post-visit recruiter/candidate communications via
sites such as Facebook to help gauge interests, demographics and overall
propensity to serve in the Armed Services. While other agencies have spent five
or more years launching such an operation, Acumen Solutions and the Army were
able to get the Philadelphia center open within a year.
And the cloud solution has
delivered cost-savings results for the Army, as recruiter manpower in Philadelphia has decreased by 50 percent. “It replaces five smaller
recruitment stations in the Philadelphia area—at about the same annual operating cost,” says Maj. Larry
Dillard, the U.S. Army program manager over the center.
Acumen Solutions is making a
similar impact with other government agencies via cloud-based systems. It’s
using Salesforce.com to track financial operations for a branch of the U.S. Department
of State that monitors global nuclear-arms activity, and has developed a cloud computing
platform for the Department of Health and Human Services to manage key programs
such as an electronic health records initiative.
“We are seeing government agencies
adopt SAAS [software-as-a-service] solutions for mission-critical applications
similar to their Fortune 500 peers,” states Marty Young, managing director of
the Public Sector Practice at Acumen. “Cloud computing enables agencies to
deploy enterprise solutions in weeks instead of years, and at a cost that is
often 20 percent of the fully loaded cost of an on-premises software
implementation. It’s now becoming a standard approach that the majority of
agencies are exploring.”
