Army JTNC builds an engagement platform to support B2G interactions.

1. Challenge: Collaboration across multiple departments, all from a single platform
2. Solution: Delivering industry innovation to Defense missions
3. Results: Supporting a vast number of projects to meet a vast number of missions

The JTNC provides strategic guidance and technical support solutions for tactical communications/IT initiatives sponsored by the Military Departments, giving teams secure, interoperable, and resilient tactical capabilities – work that is often real-time in terms of demand requiring real-time perspective from subject matter experts.

“We were tasked with finding ways to enable industry and government to work more collaboratively in an unprecedented manner, which was a huge challenge,” said Kathy Klinar, JTNC Data Management Lead. “Historically, government and military agencies use legacy systems and the normal lifecycle to initiate and sustain legacy systems is measured in years. Missions are measured in weeks, if not days, and so we needed to move just as fast,” said Tim Batey, JCM Developer.

Grochowski, Batey, Klinar and team launched the Joint Communications Marketplace (JCM) on the FedRAMP and DoD-authorized Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Public Sector. It is a series of online community portals that give mission owners a platform and interface to work with one another and industry partners as they evaluate product/service offerings and inform procurement decisions based on real-time information from subject matter experts.

Here’s how it works:

• Intake and upload: Products available from the industry are uploaded via flow into the Joint Communications Marketplace (JCM). The record is tagged by product type, company, level of JCM engagement, and more. If details change or a new version becomes available, industry providers can update the information accordingly.
• Self-service: Mission owners can then log into the portal built on Experience Cloud, which pulls through the backend Service Cloud records and presents them in a retail-like webpage experience. Mission owners can browse products and services, filtering by tagged categories. They can also, based on roles, permissions, and profiles, read reports, explore product specifications, and converse with other community members (both industry and government) on discussion boards, and so on. “We also have a feature where we post announcements to either our public-facing website or some/all of our communities, alerting mission owners of news regarding tactical comms products,” said Klinar.
• Advanced Analytics: Integrated reports and dashboards on CRM Analytics help the team spot trends like which products or services are used most often, in which scenarios, and more. These reports are then shared with industry providers, helping them determine where research and development dollars might make the most impact, pinpoint communications gaps in the Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP) process, and provide more targeted customer service. They are also shared with mission owners, helping them make more informed decisions about the products and services with the biggest impact potential and see where a PO might already exist and thus attach themselves to that work vs. pursuing a new-new procurement. CRM Analytics extends this data-driven strategy further, which makes predictions and recommendations based on product or service patterns.
• Platform-level services: Automated workflow rules (“there are maybe 70 flows and subflows that all work together across this system,” said Batey) triggers emails to go out to industry partners when, say, a new RFP is announced, encouraging more engagement from subject matter experts and helping the government get word out to the industry. Salesforce Shield provides an additional layer of security to the JCM.

“JCM has also helped to level the playing field across the industry. If a smaller company is interested in getting their products in front of people but don’t have the luxury of a marketing budget like bigger brands, they can get a JCM account, upload their product, and start collaborating, Grochowski continued “This not only helps us meet small business mandates, but also drives competition and pushes everyone to be more innovative.”