Medium shot of a soldier working on a computer (Getty images)
WASHINGTON — The Army plans to roll out an initial version of its new framework for simplifying data collection later this year and is standing up a new “innovation exchange” for industry vendors that will help the service test out how to best implement their solutions, a service official told reporters.
The innovation exchange will be hosted at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., with the Army’s C5ISR Center in a lab to test industry solutions for the service’s new Unified Data Reference Architecture that will guide the Army on how to gather and distribute data to its corps level and higher.
The exchange will be open to all industry vendors, Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, told reporters on Tuesday, and the Army doesn’t want to be locked into a specific vendor. Swanson said the service hopes this model will attract more industry participation.
“So we’re standing up an implementation of it to vet it, validate it,” Swanson said following an industry day for the effort at Aberdeen on Tuesday. “We’ll tweak what we need and…we’re calling it the innovation exchange because it’s going to become a venue for industry to be able to come in and number one: plug their black box in and see if it’s compliant. So that will help them understand if they need to make any adjustments to comply with the reference architecture.
And number two: bring solutions to some gaps that we know we will have,” she continued. “I mean this is an architecture, it’s not a product.”
With the Unified Data Reference Architecture, the Army wants a system that is decentralized and is defined by specific domains, which the Army is working to define. The plan will span both enterprise and tactical environments.
While Tuesday’s industry day was a follow up to a second request for information the Army put out about the plan, the service is planning to release a third RFI in July and is on track to complete “version one” of the reference architecture by the end of September.
“The intent is to require compliance with this architecture as our programs start to issue [requests for proposals] beyond that,” Swanson said.
The service also plans to integrate artificial intelligence capabilities into the Unified Data Reference Architecture.
“AI is going to absolutely be a critical component of any data architecture that we use because you have to have, I think, AI type of capabilities to be able to cull through all of the data that you may have to be able to get to whatever it is that you’re trying to get to,” she said. “So certainly that’s going to be a big component of the analytics piece of this data architecture.”
