Seize the Data
The critical piece to making government work is
no longer systems, but the ability to mine, analyze and use the
information in systems
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,
but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about
the bird.
—Richard Feynman, 1965 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics
...
Force transformation
While DISA has many of the day-to-day tactical responsibilities for
shifting the military’s approach to information, the Pentagon’s Office
of Force Transformation is the starting point for creative, long-term
approaches to network-centric warfare.
Cmdr. Greg Glaros, a former Navy fighter pilot, is
a transformation strategist for OFT, thinking up new ways to get
information to what he calls the point of the spear—the war- fighter on
the ground.
“He who uses that information first, wins,” he said.
But soldiers on the ground can’t be inundated with
so much data they are paralyzed by the quantity of it. The information
has to be sorted, prioritized, analyzed and evaluated for accuracy, as
well as a host of other processes to make it useful.
To Glaros, all these tasks can be sorted into two
large groups. The first is the information chain—identifying what it
takes to gather, store and share information. Second is the action
chain.
“What does your organization have to do to take
advantage of it?” he said. “It’s organizational alignment, and how we
have the capacity to organize actions with coherence.”
One example of these two chains coming together
into one initiative dreamed up by OFT is TacSat—short for tactical
satellite—a program to launch microsatellites, significantly smaller
and lighter than conventional ones. They can be configured with many
kinds of payloads, built in less than a year and launched with
commercial rockets, all for a fraction of the cost of conventional
satellites.
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