By Sean Green | STRIKEWERX Director of Marketing & Communication
BOSSIER CITY, La. — Air Force Global Strike Command and its partners are making progress on a digital platform that will aid future leaders and decision makers in the Command.
The team responsible for building the Portfolio-level Digital Engineering Platform demonstrated their progress to select invitees at an expo held in June.
The technology transition program is led by the AFGSC A9 Analyses, Assessments and Lessons Learned Directorate. It is sponsored by the Office of the Chief Scientist and partially developed through a Partnership Intermediary Agreement between AFGSC and Cyber Innovation Center in Bossier City, Louisiana.
“The PDEP team is creating a consolidated platform to host cleaned AFGSC data for analysis, visualization and decision-making support,” explained Crawford Watkins, CIC program manager for PDEP. “This has the potential to change the way the Command operates and conducts business. We aim to automate many repetitive tasks that soak up Airmen’s time, increasing speed of reporting, increase availability of information to those who need it, and reveal previously unknown, potentially useful information.”
The development of the platform was facilitated by AFGSC bringing together the latest in technology from small business, Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation capability from MITRE Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis, and AFGSC A9 expertise.
PDEP will be utilized by Airmen and AFGSC staff to gather business intelligence, perform data mining, conduct analysis projects, and support decisions. The Command, in general, will use it to look at potential courses of action.
“PDEP is a groundbreaking approach to using data within the Command. It will allow better decision-making to optimize mission effectiveness and use of our funding. We’re looking forward to completion of PDEP, although the investment is already paying off,” said Dr. Donna Senft, AFGSC chief scientist.
Over the past year, CIC stood up an infrastructure to allow for rapid PDEP development, built out the development team, and made large strides forward in data gathering, data preprocessing, data discovery, and development operations.
This led up to the PDEP Expo held at the end of June. This opportunity saw AFGSC and its partners showcase the latest developments, software, methodology and overall design to the Command’s leadership.
Watkins noted the participation and excitement of Command staff attendees was promising.
“The feedback from everyone involved tells us that the PDEP Expo was a success. We were able to showcase the potential this project brings to the Command and have some new faces gain a better understanding and interest in PDEP,” said Watkins.
While the platform continues to develop and evolve as the Command, Air Force, and DoD make data more readily available, the PDEP development team continues to advance the analytical storage and presentation of AFGSC data. AFGSC and its partners will continue pushing the progress of how data is analyzed used to make the best decisions possible for the Command.
PDEP has the potential to affect every area of the Command — whether programmatic decision making, more efficient use of a budget, assigning manpower where it’s most needed, or inventory tracking and encouraging creation of necessary parts at Command machine shops.