FIELDING THE FUTURE
BLAZING A TRAIL
“In the beginning, we never thought that people would take to this the way they have,” said Army Vantage prod- uct lead Miranda Coleman. “It was kind of an uphill battle at first, when we had [then-Army Chief of Staff] Gen. Mark A. Milley saying he wanted us to visualize
‘all Army data.’ Well, that’s a monumental thing to think of doing. No one had ever attempted it.”
Coleman, who has been with the project since its incep- tion, has also been deeply involved in the competitive prototyping processes the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS) has employed. The competition began in June 2018, when 28 compa- nies were invited to demonstrate their commercial capabilities to meet the Army Vantage requirement. On Aug. 15, 2018, Army Contracting Command – New Jersey (ACC-NJ) awarded five vendors fixed-price agreements for Phase 1 prototyping through an other- transaction agreement (OTA). ACC-NJ then invited two of the five vendors to continue the prototype process through an award of the fixed-price option for Phase 2 on Dec. 21, 2018. ACC-NJ invited one vendor to continue Phase 2 on June 26, 2019, followed by a fixed-price extension on Aug. 23. The extension allowed the Army to continue to use Army Vantage as a service, add 500 designated users and process the authority to operate for the DOD network. Finally, a production other-transaction agreement was awarded on Dec. 13, for up to four years (one base year and three option years) for Army Vantage.
“A challenge, which I think we’re overcoming, is that no one had done this before in the way that we’ve done it,” Coleman explained—“prototyping and using the OTA, moving as quickly as we’ve been moving. Our process of iterating with folks and not going in with set require- ments and standards has been challenging at times, but people are starting to come around to understand that you can keep iterating and changing until you get to a solution that you want.”
“There is no playbook, no precedent that I’m aware of, that you can read and understand how we should be taking this on,” agreed Col. Kyle Jette, lead data scien- tist for the program.
“We’ve been extremely lucky,” Coleman added, “between having Ms. [Chérie] Smith as our PEO [program execu- tive officer], having Dr. Markowitz as our functional, Gen. McConville, and Gen. Milley when he was the chief of staff. At the corps level, too, with Lt. Gen. Kurilla and Maj. Gen. Mingus—having those senior leaders believe in this effort and having their organizations embrace it has been very helpful. So many leaders are making it a priority for their folks to share their data with Col.
Jette’s team, who then verify that the platform is faith- fully representing the original data and make sure that what those leaders are seeing is accurate and trustworthy.”
“There were folks, initially, who did not want to change the way the Army was doing business,” said Col. Harry Culclasure, director of the Strategic Initiatives Group at PEO EIS. “In the last several months, many of them have now seen the potential of this platform, and all of a sudden, Miranda is getting dozens of calls a day about having access and being a part of one of the lines of effort.”
And the calls keep coming with requests to help with real-world problems. Army Vantage is in the process of building a COVID common operating picture, or
“display,” working closely with G-3, G-4, U.S. Army Mate- riel Command, the Army Surgeon General’s Office and the Defense Health Agency’s COVID-19 task force. The display is pulling authoritative data from multi- ple sources to provide an overview of personnel with confirmed cases, the status and location of medical equipment (personal protective equipment, test kits, ventilators, etc.), medical capacity, and unit readiness based on the number of infected Soldiers.
—ELLEN SUMMEY
“We’re leaning forward and finding new ways to solve problems by using
authoritative data and analytics.”
https://asc.ar my.mil 19
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