Senior Vice President Mike Davenport discusses technologies that speed decisions.
Key themes:
>> MICHAEL DAVENPORT: My name is Michael Davenport. I'm a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, and I currently lead the ISR business within the Digital Battlespace.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: Why is shared data critical to warfighters at the edge?
>> MICHAEL DAVENPORT: Supporting the warfighters at the edge is extremely important.
When you're at the edge, you have limited resources, you have limited bandwidth, and you have limited connectivity. And you need to make decisions rapidly. Being able to get information to those commanders to make more informed decisions is extremely important. When you're talking about especially a multidomain operation.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: What is the key to connecting data across the joint force?
>> MICHAEL DAVENPORT: It starts with that data fabric to be able to ensure that you have access to the data. And then in the future, if you wanted to be able to ensure that you can take action on that data (to) use different techniques such as AI and machine learning to be able to make it more useful for your weapon target systems. Such as, if you're doing a weapon target pairing for a sensor to shooter capabilities, you’d be able to do that in a more effective and efficient way.
Vice President Kate Mercer explores the advantages of open systems.
Key themes:
>>KATE MERCER: My name is Kate Mercer. I work for Booz Allen. I've been with the firm for over 22 years and my new role that I'm really excited about is with the Digital Battlespace Platform and leading part of the leadership team for the engineering team.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: What is one obstacle with DOD systems that slows progress to JADC2?
>>KATE MERCER: They are proprietary in most cases. They have proprietary software, proprietary APIs. They do point-to-point interfaces that tend to increase and drive development costs and take a much longer time to make changes and updates for the warfighter.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: How does Booz Allen help DOD overcome monolithic systems?
>>KATE MERCER: Since Booz Allen is at the crossroads of mission and technology and we really occupy that digital integrator space, we're in a unique position to bring in partners, whether they're small businesses, large businesses, technology companies, and able to deliver technology at a more rapid pace to our clients in their mission.
Senior Vice President Khalid Syed explains Booz Allen's approach to digital integration.
Key themes:
>>KHALID SYED: Hi, I am Khalid Syed. I am a senior vice president at Booz Allen and I lead our C4 business in the Digital Battlespace.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: How does Booz Allen enable systems integration across the joint force?
>>KHALID SYED: Booz Allen has been at the forefront of being that digital integrator. We stood up the Digital Battlespace, and the heart of that is being able to break these monolithic proprietary systems. (And) you can do that in very efficient, cost-effective ways. We have been focused on enabling data sharing and abstracting these systems and the data they generate right from the actual proprietary systems. And be able to share that data across all services.
>> ON-SCREEN QUESTION: What is one key way Booz Allen helps DOD accelerate JADC2?
>>KHALID SYED: (We) help the government own the technical baseline, own the source code, and have done fairly well in helping modernize a program like the Air Force DCGS. Where it was a monolithic, proprietary system to what it is today; an open architecture, modular… (you) can bring any mission applications to it. And we try to take the same philosophy across all ISR, C2, and special missions.
