Benchmarking best practices in transformation for Sea Enterprise

Sea Enterprise is the resource-enabling component of the Navy's Sea Power 21 initiative. In recognition of a future resource-constrained environment, Sea Enterprise seeks to reform the culture and business practices of the Navy so as to generate resources internally that can be applied to reinvestment and recapitalization. Sea Enterprise contracted the Center for Defense Management Reform to research transformation and benchmarking best practices in the private sector. The aim of this research is to help Sea Enterprise understand, design and implement its agenda for organizational change. This report presents a brief recent history of management reform within the Department of Defense and a summary review of current business management transformation initiatives in the DoD and in the services. Then, a survey of the scholarly and practitioner literature on organizational change explores the questions of first-order and second-order change, and looks at models of incremental, episodic and continuous change. Next, this report examines various types of benchmarking and identifies benchmarking candidates from both private- and public-sector organizations categorized by distinctive best practices that may be applicable to Sea Enterprise. The report concludes that further in-depth benchmarking by matching Sea Enterprise with specific organizations could contribute to the success of Sea Enterprise. Modeling and benchmarking can help the leaders and managers of Sea Enterprise understand, promote, and advance the success of this important change initiative.-- p. iv.