At Ease: Army Officers Avoid ProgrammingAt Ease: Army Officers Avoid Programming

The acquisition officers at the U.S. Army's Fort Monmouth base aren't programmers, but they need to be able to quickly build impromptu applications that pull together information--such as an inventory of computer supplies--from different databases to help them manage division-sized units.

Now, using a visual point-and-click dashboard environment, they can pull out data on "whether a project is on schedule, what it's costing, where the team members are, and how many hours they've worked," says John Dalton, VP of advanced programs for CACI Technologies Inc., the subcontractor that's built an executive information-management system to help this effort.

For the project, CACI used InstaKnow Inc.'s Active Collaboration Engine, which employs if-then rules to build connectivity to a wide variety of data sources, extract data, then transform and deliver it in a customized view. Such a process would normally require hours of programming. Included wizards enable connections to most mainframe systems."You don't need a black belt in C++ programming to implement this," says Dalton, who helped select the engine and implemented the executive information-management system in two months. "What we're doing is eliminating the need for the programmer."