JAMES MCMICHAEL
Acting President, Defense Acquisition University
Defense Acquisition University’s (DAU) mission is to provide a global learning environment to support a mission-ready defense acquisition workforce that develops, delivers and sustains effective and affordable war-fighting capabilities. As DAU’s acting president, James McMichael needed to guide the corporate university as it overhauled its enterprise learning strategy.
This year, DAU redefined its enhanced enterprise learning strategy with a new learning technology roadmap. This laid out seven strategic drivers for learning transformation, each designed to streamline and improve the organization’s learning. The seven drivers were: learning infrastructure, virtual environments, personalization, collaboration, mobile, media and innovative classroom and learning technologies.
Among the enterprise learning changes that took place under these strategic drivers, DAU upgraded its LMS to increase capacity, ease use and improve access; initiated efforts to provide more learning via virtual environments; promoted expanded collaboration in traditional and online learning experiences; and incorporated social media into daily learning activities.
As a result, DAU made its operation more integrated and cost efficient. Through its revamped learning framework, the university provided 11.2 million hours of formal and informal continuous learning as well as 6.8 million hours of training. It provided 636 mission assistance efforts, which totaled 624,000 hours, and graduated more than 200,000 students. It also reached its 160,000th Acquisition Community Connection (ACC) member. ACC is a tool to facilitate collaboration, sharing and knowledge transfer among learners across the organization.
