Transitioning NAVSEA to the Future: Strategy, Business, and Organization

The responsibilities of the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the Navy's largest Systems Command, span all aspects of the life cycle of ships, submarines, and their components--from acquisition through support to the Navy Program Executive Officers (PEOs), to in-service engineering and maintenance, to retirement/disposal. This report is intended to assist NAVSEA in providing this full spectrum of services in the twenty-first century in an environment of continuing downsizing, declining Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) infrastructure and resources, and increasing competition from the private sector for scientific, engineering, and management resources. It presents a three-phase planning methodology to identify the implications for NAVSEA's products, services, and organizational alignments of NAVSEA a decade in the future, in 2007. Identifying Navy strategy and NAVSEA responsibilities for aiding that strategy in 2007, the first phase presents a framework for translating strategy and responsibilities into products and services. Viewing NAVSEA as a business that must identify its markets, customers, and portfolio of products, the second phase presents a process of successive narrowing. Such narrowing determines quantitatively, using measures of importance, breadth, and market-emphasis growth, among others, which products--across NAVSEA--are most important and most central to the key competencies of the business and, hence, must receive most emphasis for managerial decisions for investment and resource allocation. Presenting NAVSEA as a diverse corporation, the third phase offers an approach that must rely on the strategic intents defined in the other two phases for restructuring the NAVSEA organization to maintain competitive advantage and sustain its central products and capabilities. The planning methodology should be of use to other government organizations and to commercial organizations that are involved in business-planning decisions involving activities, products, markets, technologies, people, facilities, and organizational realignment.