The U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center’s (ARDEC) innovative software system program, eNOVA, was named the Army’s best Knowledge Transformation Initiative for 2006. An award for the program was presented during the Army Knowledge Awards ceremony conducted at the 2006 LandWarNet Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in August 2006. The Army Knowledge Awards recognize breakthrough initiatives that best provide critical knowledge sharing and collaboration solutions for improving situational awareness and organizational decision-making.

The Knowledge Transformation Initiative in particular, said ARDEC Director of Knowledge Management and Center Information Officer George Albinson, recognizes the agency that most effectively integrates commercial software into its government databases. Throughout the government, hundreds of different applications are used to process various business aspects of the organization. To save time and money, the government is trying to transform, or streamline, all of the applications into only three different programs. According to Albinson, ARDEC has been recognized as the leading government model of transformation because, through eNOVA, it has successfully streamlined all of its business functions into one software system.

The eNOVA software is an innovative combination of Systems Application and Programming (SAP) and Oracle software, which saves the government money because SAP and Oracle are commercial-off-the-shelf products. And although ARDEC did not develop SAP or Oracle software, ARDEC was the first Department of Defense program to buy SAP.

Army Knowledge Award winners are vetted against high-level selection criteria, including return on value, collaboration, impact, scalability, transformation, customer focus, streamlining and end-to-end integration, which incorporates cross-functional processes.