About this event

The Chief Digital & Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) hosted the Advana Industry Day on September 18, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA. The Advana Industry Day served as a collaborative event for the CDAO and its industry partners to engage in insightful discussions and knowledge-sharing. The event aimed to explore potential partnerships and opportunities for industry involvement in the ongoing enhancement and execution of the Advana platform. Advana is a common platform designed for mission owners, analysts, and data scientists to simplify more than 3,000 business systems.

The DoD’s largest big-data system, Advana, is moving from its current contracting vehicle to a new model that is open to a wider range of potential vendors. This change will help the increasingly popular platform scale to meet more, varied needs from a wider population of government users. CDAO desires to leverage innovative solutions from both traditional and nontraditional industry vendors and ensure Advana remains a leader in the CDAO’s new Open DAGIR construct, which stands for the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories. Combined with its experimentation-based approach to capability development, CDAO’s aim is to give industry more access to government-owned data and users to tools and services to develop relevant and timely products for decision advantage.

The objectives of the Advana Industry Day were to:

• Share the origin story of Advana, its mission space, and its relationship to CDAO’s Open DAGIR approach to scaling data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
• Provide insights on opportunities for traditional and nontraditional industry vendors to participate in ongoing Advana development activities, including fundamental knowledge to provide Advana architecture development and Advana application development.
• Discuss initial ideas and solicit feedback on partner workflows, draft statements of work, solicitation criteria, the Open DAGIR construct, and the acquisition strategy for participating in Advana development, from design and development to testing and scaling.
  

Download the Advana Industry Day PDF

Opening Remarks from Dr. Radha Plumb

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Industry Day Web Journal

This web journal captures and organizes the forum’s events in a chronological, high-level format. Graphic Facilitators captured key ideas throughout the day.

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Keynote Address

Dr. Radha Plumb, DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer

The mission of CDAO is to accelerate the adoption of digital and AI across DoD. There are three sections of focus – enablement, speed, and scale. CDAO is a new organization that combines expertise across DoD to drive digital transformation.

Advana has grown to 100,000+ users connecting over 500 sources showing data driven success.

OPEN DAGIR is a holistic approach to create speed, interoperability, and access to reliable technology assisting commanders with making better decisions faster. The heart of the OPEN DAGIR approach is to:

• Enable interoperability and transparency
• Ingest data into one set of tools that can be used by other tools
• Drive common elements
• Provide a federated governance process
• Add transparency and support while protecting intellectual property
• Delivering the right capabilities on the right timeline

We know we are not always easy to work with, but we are on a mission to improve that. Sessions like this one today are to provide an opportunity for you to offer candid feedback.

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Advana Overview and Background

Mitchell Fielder, Kate Sieve, & Cody Ferguson

Mitchell Fielder, Division Chief of Enterprise Analytics & Acting Principal Director for Enterprise Platforms and Services
Advana's origin story dates back to 2017. Considering the scale of the DoD, the size of our fighting force, and the extensive supply chain, there was a vast ocean of data to capture, curate, and index. Initially conceived as a financial model, Advana now spans across numerous business domains and departments.

In 2018, we recognized the need for common data and a centralized data repository. This led to the launch of the Advana brand in May of that year. Our partnership with the Navy in 2020 resulted in the launch of Jupiter. The following year, 2021, marked the beginning of AI and the data accelerator initiative's global expansion. Finally, in 2022, we became part of CDAO.

Kate Sieve, Financial Management Operations and Analytics Division Chief, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)
Advana, initially developed as an audit tool, has since evolved to support a wide range of functional domains. It now serves as an operational platform for research, analysis, workflow management, finance, operations, and reporting.

The platform's key strengths include providing accurate data, implementing customer-centric design, and offering curated information to its users.

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a significant turning point for Advana, transforming it from a primarily financial support platform into a robust readiness response system.

Cody Ferguson, Data and AI Services Division Chief for Enterprise Platforms and Services

What Advana has accomplished:

• Solved common problems across DoD
• Established federated data catalog
• Understand usefulness of data (quality, sources, and access)
• Visualized data for senior leadership ease of use
• Set up automation to ingest data
• Enabled users to get data into the platform they can access and use it

What Advana has become:

• We have 100,000+ users and 10% are builders. They use Advana to run sequence and workload tasks automating very manual tasks. They use builder capabilities to assist our soldiers.
• Operating 24/5 following the sun model.
• Community spaces are organizations that have invested in Advana and use it for their entire organization – Air Force, Navy, TransCom.
• Original platform provided development as a service. Now moving into the future of multi-user ecosystem to enable advanced analytics.

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Open DAGIR & Advana

Garrett Berntsen & Eugene Kuznetsov

Garrett Berntsen, Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer for Missions Analytics

Overview: The CDAO organization supports the delivery of thousands of data, analytics and search products for DoD users across its enterprise platforms, tools and services.

• Across the board our priority is delivering high-quality, scalable solutions.
• On the application side, we’re focused on customer success via agile product management and data analytics best practices.
• On the infrastructure side, we’re focused on technology enhancements that allow us to maximize data sharing and defining standards that allow us to get to a more platform-agnostic ecosystem.
• The key to scale is creating interoperability with all systems so we can quickly put proven solutions into the hands of our customers.
• We also need to ensure everything is built with security in mind, so constant engagement with our cyber teams on access management and authorization are critical.

Why: The goal of the Open DAGIR construct is to enable speed, flexibility, and interoperability:

• Enterprise-level infrastructure to ensure reliable, enduring access to the Government-owned, Contractor-operated data stacks that can onboard new capabilities quickly.
• Enterprise-level infrastructure to ensure reliable, enduring access to the Government-owned, Contractor-operated data stacks that can onboard new capabilities quickly.
• The decoupling of platforms and data through an emphasis on platform and data interoperability, to help fight the natural tendency to silo data.
• Agile requirements and acquisition processes that accelerate testing and procurement of digital capabilities.

Eugene Kuznetsov, Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer for Enterprise Platforms and Services

• We need to solve multiple problems at once. We can't have our war-fighters wait 16-18 months to get the capabilities Open DAGIR helps unlock.
• Need to bring our code to meet our capabilities in tech and defense.
• Need the correct government information to support (secure, faster, and accurate data).
• We created a marketplace for people to compete on what they are best at – For example, if your skill is AI, then you can work on the AI portion.
• The principle applies to all efforts and implementation.

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Advana 1.2 Deep Dive & Deeper Open DAGIR

Alex O’Toole, Infrastructure and Platforms Division Chief for Enterprise Platforms and Services, & Cody Ferguson, Data and AI Services Division Chief for Enterprise Platforms and Services

Advana 1.2 - Lessons learned

• Platform needs to rapidly onboard new technologies
• More transparent and efficient ATO
• More monitoring and mediation
• Reliability of the platform needs to increase

Why Advana 1.2?

• Users and data sources growing exponentially
• There is a need for industry to easily integrate into government platforms
• Government clients need more control and access

Creating standardized pipelines that automate the process and allow industry to self-deploy and self-integrate into Advana.

Deeper Open DAGIR

“We look at data sources the same way we look at people and funding” - Cody Ferguson

• All DoD data is an enterprise resource
• Publish data assets to a centralized location

We are migrating our operation model into 2.0

• Data discovery tool - available to everyone in the DoD network
• Hub and spoke model, centralized catalog but different catalogs across departments
• Automation of meta data and permission structure
• Self-service portal gives industry the ability to build your own API endpoints to access data in Advana

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Acquisition Strategy

Bonnie Evangelista, Acting Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer for Acquisition & Assurance, & Richard Wahidi, Contracting Officer, Air Force Installation Contracting Center

Advana is currently under a single-task order, the goal is to move away from operations under a single system integrator business model.

This includes:

• Creating a decentralized approach
• More agility and flexibility
• More competition and opportunities for small business
• Lower barriers to entry and adoption
• Having the ability to support and align with the self-service model
• Continue to align with the breadth of growth that we are expecting from Advana

The operating model for Open DAGIR from the acquisition standpoint:

• Build upon momentum from Trade Winds to piloting and testing
• Work with AAMAC, will need vehicles that allow to scale to end-user base
• Rapid piloting and accelerated testing

AAMAC

• Create a diverse ecosystem of digital capability providers
• Analytic, AI, and mission needs from any DoD department

Needs of the Advana platform itself

• Although we are currently looking to award a target range of 50-70 IDIQ’s (There will be on ramps to this number as it evolves), the results of market research may change this range.
  • There will be unpriced IDIQ’s
  • Can be determined as commercial vs. non-commercial by use case

Award process

• How many focus areas a contractor needs to demonstrate is a variable number that will depend on meeting a target range of IDIQs.
  • Focus areas are self-descriptive capability areas that are anticipated to remain relevant to Advana- there are 29 currently determined.
• Evaluation Factors: Technical experience and small business
• Past experience with government is not required

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Next Steps

Bonnie Evangelista, Acting Deputy Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer for Acquisition & Assurance

Hopefully you have seen lots of opportunities today. Please respond to our RFI. We look forward to your feedback.