Source: United States Department of Defense
Good morning, everyone. This a great event and these events don’t happen without a lot of teamwork so I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank all our teams who have put in so much time and work leading up to it. A special thanks to the teams that made this happen in CDAO – our Acquisition & Assurance, Mission Analytics, and Enterprise Platform and Services and our Air Force acquisition team partners at AFICC. And thanks to you all for joining us here today.
I want to take a few minutes to provide some context to the more in depth briefs you’ll get today and preview our Advancing AI Multiple Award Contract – which at a $15 billion dollar ceiling and 10-year period of performance will be one of the largest data and AI government acquisition actions ever. Before I talk at you for the next 10 minutes – let me start with the Who, then move to the “Why” and the “How” — to include more details on the AAMAC.
As most of you know, I am the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer. Our mission is to accelerate adoption of digital and AI solutions across DOD. I sort of think of this as having two parts: Advancing deterrence by ensuring our warfighters have the very best digital capabilities and beating bureaucracy by ensuring our critical business functions – like financial management, logistics, and health care – have the digital solutions to deliver for the warfighters and the taxpayers.
What that means in practice is that I oversee that teams that do everything from the policy and governance process to the teams that deliver and sustain the data and AI infrastructure to the teams that work with key customers around DOD to ensure they have the right digital solutions. Functionally – we approach this broad mission by aligning our teams into three buckets: ENABLE, SPEED, and SCALE. From the outside our structure can feel opaque, so I think it’s worth sharing in some detail how we’re organized and how we coordinate to across our teams to deliver for the Department.
- ENABLE encompasses the writing of policies and then the processes that promulgate and oversee these practices across DOD. This includes setting formal standards, delivering best practices, building templates and tools, and also defining acquisition pathways and processes to put capabilities in the hands of DoD users.
- SPEED relates to areas where we put direct investment and staff expertise to develop and deliver solutions on an accelerated timeline – to really prove out the art of the possible. You all are seeing that in the advanced command and control space with the work in GIDE and the recent minimum viable capability for CJADC2.
- SCALE is focused on the delivery of large, central enterprise platforms that include data stacks; development environments and test and evaluation tools to build capabilities; the data, analytic, and AI enabled products that spread insights across the enterprise; and the assurance processes to build an interoperable ecosystem of platforms and products that are technically sound, secure, and work together to deliver real value. My Deputy CDAOs – Eugene Kuznetsov and Garrett Berntsen – who lead these “SCALE” functions in CDAO, will talk more about their efforts later today.
As many of you know – CDAO is a new organization. We began by combining pockets of excellence across AI, data, and analytics teams in DoD. And, while each of these teams had promising work, when combined they were truly greater than the sum of their parts. As we move into our third year, we are working to create that flywheel that connects these ENABLE, SPEED, and SCALE functions to drive the digital transformation across the entire defense enterprise.
Okay – so then WHY are we here today. The short answer is – Open DAGIR
In May we announced Open DAGIR, which stands for Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories. {I know…it’s a mouthful]
But the Open DAGIR construct is actually straightforward in nature – it is a holistic approach that aligns the architecture (that is platforms, data, and applications) and acquisition approaches (governance, budget, incentives and industry engagements.) The structure is driven to create speed, flexibility, interoperability and is made up of three parts:
(1) enterprise-level infrastructure to ensure reliable, enduring access to the Government-owned, Contractor-operated technology stacks that can onboard new capabilities quickly.
(2) enterprise-wide applications that we procure through license agreements to streamline access and standardize a core set of digital tools.
(3) a transparent and agile acquisition process to prototype and where appropriate scale new digital solutions.
Open DAGIR is by construction not about by a single company or product – it is a way to leverage a competitive acquisition process to rapidly procure and integrate best-in-class technology from industry to meet specific DoD requirements and ensure interoperability.
In July we held our first Open DAGIR Insight Day, which outlined how we use our experimentation series – GIDE—to identify new technical capabilities to solve novel challenges focused on our strategic command and control requirements. The digital tools and underlying infrastructure that enable what we call “strategic command and control,” a critical warfighting function. This was the first line of effort under Open DAGIR.
Today we are here to talk about our second line of effort – focused on enabling enterprise-level data-driven digital solutions with tools ranging from advanced analytic applications that can yield greater insights in a fraction of the time to AI-enabled applications that can transform critical functions from the boardroom to the battlefield. And much of this builds off the work of Advana – our Advanced Enterprise Analytics at the Department of Defense – program.
Before we talk about Advana’s future, it’s worth talking a bit about the journey. I returned to the Department in early 2021 and was Deputy Secretary Hicks’ Chief of Staff. In 2021, she outlined a north star for creating Data Advantage with five Data Decrees. Inherent in that document was a recognition that the Department’s data ecosystem is distributed and heterogeneous. To balance the value of this federated ecosystem with the need to integrate data, she established Advana as the single enterprise data analytics platform for the Department’s leadership. Since then, Advana has grown to DOD’s largest data platform – rapidly reaching over 100,000 users, connecting 500+ source systems and proving out the promise of data-driven digital solutions. Later today you will hear from several members of our team and key customers about Advana’s successes. Their journey and the growth of the platform has been truly remarkable and is a testament to the Department’s rapid digital transformation. Rooted in these successes but with many lessons learned, we are now evolving Advana – everything from the scope to the technical architecture to the acquisition approach to meet the needs of the future. Advana was a critical enabler along our data transformation but it could never be singular end-state solution for all of DoD’s data needs. DoD – which has an $800 billion dollar budget, 3 million employees, a health care system with 9 million beneficiaries, and supply chain with 3 times the suppliers of Walmart. We have more ground vehicles than major shipping companies, more planes than major commercial airlines. We operate 24/7 and cover all contingencies. Globally, the analytic and AI requirements of the DoD are broad and deep and so – we in CDAO knew we needed to continue to adapt and modernize our data backbone to meet those needs.
So – HOW are we going to meet these diverse needs?
That’s really the future of Advana – to move beyond a singular, vertically integrated stack and applications to a more federated ecosystem. To do that and to ensure we can integrate the existing data and analytic infrastructure with future solutions, we are executing a series of technical enhancements – called “Advana 1.2” – that will ensure more explicit government stewardship of the platform – to include improved pathways for integration and government-owned environment for development. This will allow us to accelerate the addition of new software capabilities, and allow the Advana data infrastructure to be more easily interoperable with other platforms. You will hear more details about these architecture upgrades from our platforms lead and really one of the builders of Advana 1.0– Alex O’Toole—later today.
In parallel – under the Open DAGIR construct, we are moving from a single award contract to a multiple award IDIQ contract that will be open to a wide range of potential vendors, called the Advancing AI Multiple Award Contract (AAMAC). This 10-year, $15 billion dollar ceiling IDIQ will be the largest data and AI government acquisition action in history and will be open for customers across DoD. The AAMAC will help scale our data backbone and bring in new digital tools to meet more varied needs from a wider population of DoD users, encourage vendor diversity and partnerships, and drive innovation and mission delivery at scale. It will also set the foundation for transformative investments into data and AI across the DoD enterprise to make real this Open DAGIR construct.
Let me try to unpack what I mean by the Open DAGIR construct – at the heart of the Open DAGIR approach is a common foundation to enable broad data access and interoperability in tools. This allows data that is ingested and enriched by one set of tools to be used in another tool set. In other words, every platform, tool, and application within the Open DAGIR ecosystem will need to meet a common baseline set of requirements for interoperability and, where possible, integration.
Our teams will drive the core elements of commonality and flexibility across key technical architecture elements such as:
- Building a common architecture or backbone to support data interchange and discoverability across platforms, tools, and applications.
- Establishing common enterprise APIs and a common approach to federated data governance.
- Standing up a federated governance process based on alignment with core principles but allowing different solutions to compliance – a sort of trust but verify construct.
- Establishing interoperable stacks- a clear pipeline and pathway for successful applications.
So in addition to the acquisition and technical upgrades, in the coming months, you’ll see CDAO defining these core technology principles to enable interoperability, including things as basic as: “how do we define a platform?” or “how do we define an application?” to the more complex but still critical “what are the minimum data parity standards we need to set across Open DAGIR platforms?” and “how is intellectual property protected for third party developers while ensuring government insights?”
Through the Open DAGIR approach, our intent is to add transparency and support industry innovation by protecting vendor proprietary applications and intellectual property, and simultaneously maintain appropriate Government ownership and access to our data and infrastructure.
The end-state we’re striving for is very achievable – it’s about delivering the right capability delivery on the right timeline. And that means creating a transparent and accessible set of requirements, a collaborative environment for industry innovation, the right protections for intellectual property, and flexible and agile license agreements fit for various stages of prototypes, production, or sustainment.
Our goal with Open DAGIR and the forthcoming AAMAC is to lay the foundation for more predictable and repeatable tools and processes that match technology solutions with the resources and acquisition pathways to put solutions in the hands of DoD users.
America’s enduring advantage is our vibrant and creative industry. On the government side – our measure of success is our ability to partner quickly and effectively to deliver those innovative new solutions to our warfighters. We – simply put – cannot afford to fail. And this is truly a partnership with industry – we need your dedication, innovation, and candid feedback to help us drive digital transformation across the DoD enterprise at SCALE.
Let me close by calling out the elephant in the room – I know we in DOD are not always easy to work with. The acquisition process can be daunting and feel cumbersome and slow, and it can be hard to know who to call. Let me assure you – we’re trying to be less hard to work with
This Industry Day is just one of multiple opportunities over the next few months for partners across industry to actively engage in plenary/educational sessions alongside CDAO to talk about Open DAGIR and provide meaningful feedback on our approach for the framework and the future of Advana. We have RFIs, challenges, and future industry days. We’re working with a variety of industry associations and groups to set up smaller feedback sessions. We look forward to continuing the conversation and engaging with you all as we strive to solve some of DoD’ toughest and most complex data and AI challenges.
Thank you for your time and we welcome your feedback.
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