The Defense Logistics Agency’s five-year IT modernization journey reached an important milestone earlier this summer.

DLA moved its catalog system off a 35-year-old COBOL-based system and onto a new modern platform.

Adarryl Roberts, DLA’s chief information officer, said the agency will now have a system that will allow it to process data and requests much faster.

“A lot of our manual processes that we do today in our old COBOL system, we can automate,” Roberts said in an interview with Federal News Network. “Then from a department perspective and a NATO perspective, it streamlines their ability to do [data] entry as well. There were some things that we wanted to do in support of NATO and support of the department that we couldn’t actually put into the COBOL system. They’re now inherently there with our commercial enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.”

The catalog system is a central repository that helps the agency to resupply DoD, allies and partners across all the domains.

Roberts said the catalog system modernization took a lot of coordination not just across DLA but with DoD and NATO partners too.

“The technology part is pretty straightforward, but the coordination of those integrations, the systems that have to feed our cataloging system, that’s been the complexity that we’ve had to deal with,” he said. “And then there’s the timing. There’s a lot going on in the world today. When you talk about Operation Epic Fury and other things that we’re supporting, that our NATO partners and other whole government partners are supporting, we’ve had to do a lot of coordination and governance.”

DLA started the catalog system modernization effort in 2021 as part of a broader IT modernization strategy outlined in 2020. The goal was to reduce technical debt across the entire agency over a 10-year period. DLA updated its strategy in 2025.

Roberts said the DLA wanted to move off of legacy systems and onto modern, commercial platforms where developers could deliver capabilities faster and continuously.

“We said we have to move faster so we started implementing 120 development cycles to deliver initial operating capability. That forced us to deal with real problems and not theoretical ones,” he said. “Over the last few years, we’ve moved to 90 days and now we are at 60 days for some projects. We are working in days and weeks like industry. We will budget and do everything the government requires us to do, but I tell our folks for our operational execution tell me we will do in days and weeks. We are not inferior to industry when it comes to development. Our workforce is eager to do that type of work, and I accept the risk if we don’t meet those goals.”

The catalog system is a good example of how DLA moved faster, and Roberts accepted any risk that came with that speed.

He said users of the catalog system will experience a more commercial look and feel with minimal customization.

“We have a configure first, customize last mindset. What is so unique about our requirement that I must build that custom code as opposed to it being a configuration change? I’m just turning on a different feature that the user would like to utilize,” Roberts said. “I think the customization piece is more driven by law, regulation and things of that nature like national security. We didn’t do that within our ERP because we had a low-code platform, and that’s where we really focus the customization. Customization is not a bad thing, even commercially. It’s how you do the technical architecture so that it’s not costly, and you don’t break the commercial software platform that you’re on. So, of course, there’s a lot of customization because of the unique nature of the Defense Department. But that’s not within our commercial platform itself. We did that through an integration with the low code platform.”

DLA stopped using the old system in June and plans to officially turn it off this summer. Roberts said he wanted to keep the legacy COBOL platform available for 60 to 90 days in case there was a problem.

“The next steps after that are a continuous lifecycle management. So deploying it was step one. Now it’s how do we continue to enhance and improve it? How do we apply AI and automation further into the processes? We don’t want to get back into a technical debt situation, so we’re going to manage this from a lifecycle perspective,” he said. “The governance hasn’t stopped. We have a functional governance board that provides those priorities. What capabilities do the users need? We have a governance board that, from an IT perspective, will evaluate those criteria. We work with the partners to understand the roadmap moving forward, and that’s going to be the process by which we do not allow a lot of customization. If we do customize, do it in a thoughtful, sustainable way.”

Now that the catalog system has reached full operating capability, Roberts said DLA is now focused on modernizing its procurement system over the next year.

He called it the agency’s last major puzzle piece for the ERP effort.

“I think organizationally, it’s that human AI connection, not just establishing it, but growing that connection and pushing that as far to the edge as possible in terms of how we have users do that.” he said. “Our strategy within DLA is about creating digital citizens. I, as the CIO shop, don’t have to build everything. The way the technology is designed and built today, I can push that as far to the edge as possible. That’s going to be the next major initiative for us. How do we move that human AI advantage as close to the edge that we can within DLA?”

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