The federal government’s leading tech media brand FedScoop has just published an insightful look inside Palantir’s support to some of the Army’s most critical mission needs. The report dives into a recent contract award that aims to bring together a wide range of disparate data from unique and often totally disjointed systems to provide decision-makers with actionable information. Which decision-makers? From what I’ve seen and from the FedScoop report it is clear this system will support operational decisions by leaders at multiple echelons of the Army. The program being supported is called the Army Leader Dashboard which implied visual ways of interacting with data. This is ambitious, but clearly Palantir has the chops to get this done.
From the FedScoop report:
Palantir’s Doug Philippone, lead of global defense, described to FedScoop the scale of integration Vantage requires. The data comes from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of systems containing training databases, equipment inventories, personnel records and maintenance reports.
“The problem for Army’s leaders and commanders at every level is you’re trying to make decisions off of accurate data but the data is stored in so many places, it’s often very hard to figure out what’s going on,” Philippone said.
As the Army tries to move into the digital age, it hopes the program will weave all of this data together and “present information in a way that is immediately understandable and actionable for an everyday end-user,” according to an early solicitation document.
On the scope of the data, FedScoop reported that it includes integration of thousands and thousands of data tables from over 190 different systems.
The goal, according to the program executive officer for the Army Cherie Smith is to revolutionize the way the Army approaches data. Smith says: We have been focused for 20 or 30 years on transactions, and I think we’re going to start really, truly making that leap to focusing on the data and the information.”
