Summary
The U.S. Air Force was looking for DFAR compliant data experts to help them deliver a large data platform project that would enable them to improve readiness, increase mission effectiveness, reduce total cost of operations, improve cyber security, and enable rapid and accurate data-drive decisions. Read about the expertise that ExistBI offered to meet their complex needs.
About VAULT program
VAULT (Visible, Accessible, Understandable, Linked, and Trusted) is a multi-million dollars data platform project designed to help the U.S. Air Force (USAF) meet their digital transformation objectives to improve readiness, increase mission effectiveness, reduce total cost of operations, improve cyber security, and enable rapid and accurate data-drive decisions. Some of the specific challenges that the VAULT program is looking to address include:
- Large number of legacy systems with numerous point-to-point interfaces that are expensive to implement and maintain.
- Antiquated, brittle architectures that inhibit legacy system enhancements to support decision making.
- “Data jails” that prevent timely data access for analytics needs of functional committees.
- Unmet desire to employ new, commercially available data services that will change the landscape of how data enables mission effectiveness.
The key tenets of the VAULT program include:
- Agile approach – Take an iterative approach.
- Solutions priorities – 1. Cloud-native services, 2. open-source software, 3. COTS products (minimize licensed software). No proprietary software.
- Cybersecure – Protect networks, devices, programs, and data.
- Vendor agnostic – No reliance on a single company.
- Product agnostic – Must allow access to many tools to meet individual mission demands.
- Flexible architecture – Allow easy of adoption of new tools and services while minimizing impact to underlaying data.
- Utilize on-premises or off-premises services
- Decoupling of compute and storage
Challenge
To meet the goals of the VAULT program, the U.S. Air Force were looking for data experts who could:
Data Preparation & Architecture – Perform tasks necessary to transform data from its raw form into a format ready for consumption by the analytical and/or systems development communities in both cloud and on-premises environments. For example, develop data export standards and perform Extract-Transform-Load activities to maximize dataset exploitability.
Data Governance – Provide expertise to develop data maturity models that account for the entire lifecycle, conduct maturity assessments, develop data models that support data management, apply design concepts to create reliable data storage environments, apply metadata management principles, develop data quality techniques that ensure data is fit for its intended purposes. Provide expertise in the areas of data stewardship, ownership, and data management policy that enable decision makers at all levels to make better operational and strategic decisions.
Agile Algorithm Solutions – Develop algorithms for execution on cloud and on-premises infrastructure to enable exploitation of USAF enterprise datasets to include production and experimental design that ensure maximum effectiveness to serve the USAF data consumers and enabling data integration and analysis across the enterprise.
Data Analytics – Conduct data analytics using state-of-the-art mathematical and machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques to support exploitation and understanding of data across the enterprise to improve effectiveness in operations and support data-driven decisions.
The organization released an RFP for a multi-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity) contract to find the right solution providers.
Solution
Based on our experience and expertise, ExistBI was chosen to be part of a large multi-disciplinary team that would enable the USAF to meet the objectives of the VAULT program. ExistBI offered the following expertise to help USAF meet their objectives:
- Data governance consultation and implementation to ensure data is governed, profiled, clean, validated, standardized, enriched, and translated.
- Informatica technology implementation to extract data from various sources, transform it according to business rules, and load it into a target data warehouse or data repository for analysis and reporting. Demonstrate hands-on solution using Informatica data governance EDC, Axon, IDQ and DPM software tools.
- Data masking for delivering sensitive data.
- Data quality to measure the accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability, and relevancy of data collected, stored, and used in a particular context.
- Big Data consulting including data analysis and deriving useful information from large volumes of structured and unstructured data.
- Data Science consulting including design and build of custom machine learning applications and products that integrate with the organization’s data.
- Data analytics and Business intelligence using tools like PowerBI and Tableau to analyze information and leverage predictive analytics to gain insights, identify breakdowns, and make better decisions that optimize business.
Results
After extensive and rigid reviews, the proposal of the consortium was short-listed by the Air Force. While the companies were not selected in the final review, the process enabled ExistBI to better understand the U.S. military needs and be prepared to meet their future needs. If you are a commercial or military organization, in need of deep expertise to help modernize your data needs so you are ready for mission-critical operations, let ExistBI be your partner.
