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The DoD Audit Is Done, And Its A Failure

TAKE NOTE (Insights and Emerging Technology)

The Pentagon’s recent announcement that it failed its first-ever audit came 28 years after Congress passed a law mandating that all federal agencies be audited. In 2010, Congress gave the Pentagon an extra seven years to do the audit.

DOD officials say no fraud or abuse was found in the 21 smaller audits which made up the full investigation of $2.7 trillion in audited dollars. There were no issues found in military pay. But only five of the 21 smaller audits received a passing grade. Yet Reuters, Defense News, and other media outlets report that Pentagon officials praised themselves for the alleged success of just getting the audit accomplished. Any private-sector CEO would be laughed out of a job for such self-congratulation.

Additionally, the Pentagon’s claim that no fraud or abuse was found in $2.7 trillion spent is both astonishing and entirely lacking in credibility. First, as NPR reported last year, the Government Accountability Office considers the Pentagon an agency with “serious financial problems.” That status is not new.

Second, there have been many egregious examples of Pentagon waste and fraud over the years. While past isn’t always prologue, there is ample evidence that just like other federal agencies, the Pentagon spends a lot of money that doesn’t do much to achieve its mission.

Perhaps the most famous fraud came when billions of dollars were shipped to rebuild Iraq. Auditors found at least eight billion was wasted. Billions more just vanished. A former inspector general who spent years looking for the missing money told The Guardian in 2014 that after more than one billion was found in Lebanon, relevant U.S. agencies collectively shrugged.

More recently and just as shocking is a 2015 report which — as exposed by The Washington Post — the Pentagon buried. That report found the Pentagon could save $25 billion per year for five years, largely through elimination of administrative inefficiencies.

A Department of Defense press release announcing the audit results said it had been started “in order to find problems and fix them.” It looks like they failed in the former, and that’s why they won’t accomplish the latter.

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UNDER DEVELOPMENT (Insights for Developers)

An Introduction to UI5

OpenUI5 and SAPUI5 Explained

OpenUI5 is an open source JavaScript UI library that you can use to build responsive web applications. SAP maintains the OpenUI5 code bank and makes it available to any user under the Apache 2.0 license. SAPUI5 is the proprietary sibling of OpenUI5 that SAP includes in packages like SAP HANA and SAP Cloud Platform. The main difference is that OpenUI5 is free to anyone and SAPUI5 licenses must be purchased from SAP. SAPUI5 has additional libraries and nice add-ons like smart controls that automatically configure OData annotations. Open UI5 and SAPUI5 are compatible, but the version and patch numbers are different. In general, you can easily switch back and forth between the two platforms. I’ll be using OpenUI for this blog, but everything covered can be done using either Open UI5 or SAPUI5.

So before we move on, let me see if I can ground some of the ABAP developers that might be reading this. First, who remembers this book?

OK, your OLD!! This book was the documentation of canned SAP Controls like the ALV Control, the Table Control, etc…etc. They were classes that had formal parameters to quickly instantiate and render a control without needing to code it. Then of course SAP introduced WebDynpro for portal rendering. Well, this may be an over-simplification, but this is the JavaScript UI5 library more or less.

Let’s take a look at OpenUI5. You can download the code for OpenUI5 on GitHub or start with the latest stable release from OpenUI5.org…

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SAPUI5 Overview

Q&A (Post your questions and get the answers you need)

Q. What is the Difference between SAP Personas and SAP Fiori?

A. First, let me say our ITP team has written an excellent blog specifically on this subject. You can access it HERE.

That said, a quick answer is as follows… SAP user experiences have two options, one is the well-known SAP Screen persona and the other is the SAP Fiori user experience. The Fiori UI5 User experience strategy is focused on transforming the transactional operational model to something that is role-oriented. SAP Screen persona on the other hand handles scenarios which aren’t managed by Fiori applications or for custom transactions.

UI v/s UX

We have to note that while User Interface or UI deals with actual elements of the interface, User experience, as the name suggests deals with the way the user feels while using the interface. The user experience ties in technology, people and processes as well. Take a look at the graphic below:

SAP Fiori UI5 and personas are the technologies offered in order to enhance UI for screens.

Take a read from the blog I mentioned above.

Cheers!

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