The Department of Defense wants to make data analytics more accessible to organizations, so it is overhauling its Advana platform to pull data from a variety of sources rather than aggregating it in one place.
“We’re really trying to open things up so that our next-generation data platform can scale and serve the needs of the enterprise in a more flexible and open way, and we want people to be able to bring their data sources into this mesh and others can build capabilities from it,” William Streilein, chief technology officer for the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and AI Office, said in an exclusive interview as part of Defense One’s Genius Machines series.
Advana, short for “Advancing Analytics,” was released in 2021 by the Chief Financial Officer of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller General) to serve as a common repository of data across the Pentagon. The tool has attracted so many users, including the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is using it to track Ukraine spending, that development of the new Advana has been put on hold while the platform is upgraded to handle unexpected traffic.
Users are feeding data into Advana from hundreds of sources, making it an increasingly useful tool.
“I mean, from a policy level, or just the comfort level of the parties that are providing the data, they know that within that environment, only the people, the constituents that are approved to have access to that data can access it,” said Streilein, whose role is to provide strategic and technical insights to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence across the Defense Department.
But approving each new source is a difficult, multi-step process. Plus, storing all the data in one place can be costly, Streinlein says. So the CDAO is considering a new approach to Advana that uses data mesh principles to simplify approvals, reduce storage costs, and make information easier to share.
“If you don’t have to move it to a single location, you can still reference it, you can look up about it through the metadata that’s advertised and leverage it when you need it,” he said.
Strainline said Advana’s infrastructure changes reflect a shift in how data is perceived from a strategic asset to a product.
“The concept of being a product is obviously well-known in the industry,” he says, “but the DoD’s embrace of this mindset means they see value when the product is used by a consumer. So when a data source – a data product manager – actually provides data in a format that someone can use, they see value and they essentially get rewarded for that consumer, which could be someone else in the department.”
