SERVING UP DATA
Initially, hunting and gathering of food and information both involved traveling out to prime hunting locations: a field, swamp or forest for a caveman, or a library for a student. Te Paleolithic hunter relied on tools such as hand axes and spears to bring down a plump mammoth, while the earnest student relied upon tools such as the card catalog or the Dewey Decimal System to find books that would be scoured for information.
Over time, technology and the invention of agriculture made the procurement of food and information much easier. Nowadays, plentiful food is only as far away as the nearest supermarket or can even be delivered to your door. And today, thanks to airborne and terrestrial sensors, modern telecommunication systems, satel- lite links and mission command systems, Army leaders have immediate access to an abundance—a mammoth amount—of information.
Tis leads to the second part of this analogy. In those early days of hunting and gathering, cavemen knew that finding and kill- ing that woolly mammoth was just the first step. To convert the animal into food, they still had to skin it, butcher it, transport the meat to a campfire and then cook it.
Like a freshly killed mammoth, raw battlefield information is not immediately ready for consumption. Te huge amount of battlefield information is overwhelming. So the first tasks are to concentrate on finding, extracting, transporting and process- ing the valuable and useful information for the data consumers.
Processing data, like processing foods, requires an infrastructure. And like the food processing infrastructure, the data processing infrastructure is driven by the needs of the ultimate consumer— the Soldier, the staff and the commander.
SERVICE LEVELS, AN INTRODUCTION Tink of all the tools, transportation, processes and options that go into food production.
Specialized farming equipment such as combines and milk- ing machines collect or harvest the raw food, which must be transported and undergo further cleaning, sorting and filtering. Depending on the proposed use of the food, we may see further transportation and storage where the food goes through final preparation to make it consumable in a variety of formats: a six- course gourmet meal served in a fine restaurant, a home-cooked meal eaten at home, a microwave burrito hastily wolfed down in a dorm or barracks room, or a Meal Ready to Eat issued to troops on the move.
88 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2023
RETHINKING THE SYSTEM
“As a service” models can help the Army rethink its data system and overhaul it. (Photo by Markus Spiske, Pexels)
Data consumption also varies. Sometimes a deep dive is needed to assess potential courses of action of an enemy. At others, a Soldier spots an oncoming group of vehicles and needs to make a snap decision on whether they are friend or foe, whether the targets should be engaged, and if so, what assets should be called in to fire upon the enemy.
To make consumable information out of raw data involves a vari- ety of processes, starting with harvesting data in many ways. Tere are external sources, including satellites, aircraft and elec- tronic sensors. Internal sources, such as unit-owned sensors, can be operated by subordinate or adjacent units, sister services, allies or intelligence agencies. Other data is collected internally, both from sensors on vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles, but also from much less glamorous sources, such as manual counts of ammunition on hand, or Department of the Army 5998e main- tenance forms.
Te collected data moves via land lines, fiber optics, wireless transmission and satellites, and is stored in both electronic and paper form: spreadsheets, hard drives, email inboxes and shared network resources.
Finally, the data is prepared for consumption. Typically, the data is transformed by staff into unique and ephemeral standardized, text-heavy, information-packed slide decks that commanders and staff have to dig through to find useful nuggets. But technol- ogy is now making it easier to quickly convert that raw data into usable and consumable information, using technologies such as
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