Leaders from the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and U.S. Central Command special operations visit aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92), in Manama, Bahrain, 2022 Accompanied by Navy leaders, more than 50 personnel visited the United States. ships docked at the Bahrain Naval Base and learned about the U.S. 5th Fleet’s integration of unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. (US Navy photo by Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Mark Thomas Mahmod)
Having insight into a wide range of data is essential for multi-domain operations. Now, military logisticians and industry can gather data outside of its intended use to provide valuable intelligence from all sources to warfighters in all domains.
This new capability is part of a U.S. Marine Corps logistics IT modernization effort known as Technical Data Management (TDM)-Catalyst. The underlying technology comes from MarkLogic progressionand it also has applications in other military services and commercial industry.
TDM-Catalyst is the first-ever cloud-based application for the USMC and gained full DoD accreditation and operating authority (ATO) on AWS in 2021. It replaces four existing systems to track, catalog and search for equipment more efficiently in the marine sector. Body inventory. This ranges from vehicles to radios and tools to literally every repair part and final product setup.
So, what type of business intelligence does Progress MarkLogic offer under TDM-Catalyst? To begin, equipment specialists define a comprehensive top-down analysis of each weapon system for the Marine Corps; think of an IKEA catalog and a nomenclature. They not only get a table of all parts, but also an exploded view of them, which allows them to better manage and define equipment variants, repairable items, spare parts, requirements over the year and maintenance activities. TDM also implements automated inventory compliance form generation and provides real-time contract planning information, such as sourcing rollup and vendor allocation.
Data created in TDM-Catalyst can be useful at all levels: from initial requirements, sourcing and cataloging, to sourcing, acquisition, inventory, tracking, planning, trending and maintenance at the depot level, which requires many parts.
Troy Gilbert is Director of Public Sector Partnerships for Progress MarkLogic.
“Through this program, we are showing that logistics data is critically important from an intelligence perspective,” said Troy Gilbert, director of public sector partnerships for Progress MarkLogic. “We tend to think we should just focus on intelligence data or operational data, but that data is critical to mission success. Organizations are now able to take data used for logistics and use it to determine business management decisions or whether a supply shortage is imminent.
And because logistics data must be protected at varying security levels, from confidential to top secret, organizations can use Progress MarkLogic security controls to enforce their field-level security policies (roles and permissions) to determine who and what can and can. I can’t view the information based on their security privileges.
In addition to logistics data, collecting business intelligence information can be very profitable in commercial aerospace. For example, Airbus must undergo a significant number of flight tests in order to keep the certifications of its aircraft up to date. Certifications can take hundreds or even thousands of flight hours, costing a fortune.
Data collected during flight testing was often unusable for additional certifications because it was very difficult to find it recorded for the specific parameters or certification required. This meant that every time new certification or additional data was needed, additional and expensive testing would have to be carried out.
“Progress MarkLogic gives aerospace companies the ability to search very large amounts of data from multiple flight tests, up to several petabytes in size,” Gilbert said. “With technology like MarkLogic Data Hub, companies don’t need to perform additional flight tests to answer new and complex questions. They are able to leverage the wealth of historical data that Progress MarkLogic can store and easily mine through its powerful search engine.
Putting a lens on top of the data
It’s no exaggeration to say that data in any system, in any business, is the foundation of all business processes. If data quality and security are not accurate, business processes will fail.
This applies to both complex data and simple data, the quantity of which is exploding exponentially. This is seen across federal agencies, defense organizations, the intelligence community, and industry. Data can be text, structured or unstructured, binary, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), and XML, to name several.
Many systems can handle simple data from tables, rows, columns, and fields well. Complex data such as emails, reports and log files are another matter. Harmonizing the two is even more difficult, but if you know how to look, that’s where the value of intelligence lies and where Progress MarkLogic excels.
“First, it’s complicated to bring together all of your company’s data,” Gilbert said. “This makes it even more complicated to have an overview of all business and operational data. When we talk about multi-model databases, that means no matter what data format you have – from table to document to geospatial – Progress MarkLogic is going to help you consolidate the information and make sense of it. It’s actually that simple.
“There are different data management software available commercially. MarkLogic’s unique value lies in its ability to centralize heterogeneous data, creating a golden record accessible across the organization, while giving you all the different perspectives on your data to help you make sense of all the relationships and connections you have within your organization. the data.”
The ability to quickly ingest raw data, search it, understand it, and then figure out how to use it based on requirements has become a defining characteristic of the concept of information dominance, particularly as requirements mature and evolve according to threat scenarios. Now add the new ability to make sense of data outside of its intended use to provide intelligence, and users have a powerful new tool for extracting every bit of value from data.
Progress MarkLogic TDM-Catalyst does all of this quickly, efficiently and in repeatable cycles. It’s much faster to design and implement data when you can ingest it in a raw format and modify it on the fly in an agile manner as you discover your needs, rather than having to first create your schema complete relationship, then understand everything. the questions that need to be answered.
We discussed how this results in new insights from data leading to business intelligence. The same goes for intelligence from all sources and operational intelligence.
All-source intelligence, for example, can be leveraged by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to inform new concepts of operations such as joint command and control across all domains. It may also be used by organizations such as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews transactions involving foreign investment in the United States and real estate transactions carried out by foreigners to determine the effect of these transactions on national security.
For the CFIUS mission, Progress MarkLogic can mark the criticality of individual parts. It doesn’t have to be the whole system; maybe it’s just part of it. By powering this, you can identify any critical parts that are essential to U.S. military readiness to ensure that the manufacturers of these vital parts are not surreptitiously purchased by a country like China or Russia.
An operational intelligence aspect of this capability could be the use of 3D additive manufacturing for certain parts. The Progress MarkLogic system can facilitate this with APIs to extract necessary data like design files, for example.
Conclusion
Using agile development practices and Progress MarkLogic Data Hub technology, organizations like the Marine Corps have been able to overcome the distinct limitations of relational databases—namely, the difficulty of ingesting disparate data schemas and formats and the challenge of creating usable data from undefined sources. .
What Progress MarkLogic accomplishes is the ability to speak in different languages in terms of data, enabling rapid synchronization of business processes and data structures. Add to that artificial intelligence and machine learning, and functions like military strategic planning that used to take weeks or even months can be accomplished in days.
Data, maps, diagrams, images, documents and clippings are ingested and understood to the point where users are proactively informed of areas that need attention. Machines can learn to activate certain functions in particular applications by turning a switch on or off, for example.
In the context of JADC2 and the Air Force’s Advanced Combat Management System, for example, where the Army is attempting to create or connect disparate data sources for multi-domain operations, the implications for Progress MarkLogic at From the user level, to the tactical level, and even to the executive level, being able to quickly capture the information needed to create situational awareness and accelerate decision-making is already a game changer.
“We need to open the door to business data stored in silos and make it accessible to others through governance models and access controls. This ensures that all data is unlocked and available for intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning or business decisioning,” Gilbert said.
