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WASHINGTON — Employees at the Defense Contracting Management Agency created a much-needed solution to decipher between the ever-changing accumulation of Department of Defense key phrases and acronyms.
Leading up to the DCMA’s IT Training Summit Innovation Contest this past summer, IT workers created a tool, dubbed the Information Dictionary, to help the agency quickly look up and see definitions for the DoD’s jargon-heavy terms and acronyms. The team behind the product won second place in the competition, according to a press release from DCMA.
“There are so many DOD and DCMA unique acronyms, and new ones are always being developed that we’re often asking, ‘what does XXXX stand for?’” Andy Bradshaw, DCMA’s Total Force Directorate Policy Branch supervisor, said in the release. “Then we go on a rabbit hunt trying to figure it out, and at times there is more than one meaning. The DCMA Information Dictionary saves us a lot of time and frustration in determining acronyms and their definitions. It’s a great tool for us, and it will be a great asset for new agency employees as well.”
He added that before the Information Dictionary was created, the agency used an Excel spreadsheet to track these key terms and acronyms.
The second-place team was made up of team lead and data architect Joseph Lowe; business architect Sabrina Francis; technology architect Larry Hairston; and security architect Keith Young. The team used artificial intelligence from reports made by Power BI — a business intelligence platform that helps turn raw data into usable observations — that combined data from the DCMA, DoD, Federal Acquisition Regulation and National Institute of Standards and Technology to build the tool. So far, it’s been used over 400 times in the past month by DCMA employees, the release said.
“We manually extracted data over a period of six months from over 660 documents including more than 28 thousand rows of data that defines over two thousand unique terms and acronyms, and nearly two thousand unique references,” Lowe said in the press release.
Though the Information Dictionary is jam-packed with data, it’s actually “very user-friendly,” Francis added.
“For example, you can pick a filter on the left-hand navigation such as ‘DCMA Acronyms’ then search the words in alphabetic order. Let’s say you pick the term ‘ACQDemo’ from the list. The filter will show you all the different possible names for that acronym plus any related capabilities and policies related to the term,” he said.
The team noted that the tool has been helpful, but there are improvements to be made. For example, automating the process of adding new terms, acronyms and definitions is next on the list. While currently only available to employees within DCMA, eventually the Information Dictionary will be available to others.
“I’m proud to say our approach to documenting organizational information for enterprise architectural purposes will be presented to DOD, other federal agencies and industry in the coming months,” Lowe said in the release.
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