The Department of Defense is wholly committed to digital transformation, a long-term proposition that affects every aspect of the nation’s defense.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the United States Air Force (USAF), the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have generated several strategies and initiatives, making it clear that digital transformation is essential to meet the National Defense Strategy (NOS) mandates to rapidly deliver advanced warfighting capabilities to the field. Though many efforts related to and supporting digital transformation activities have been ongoing across the AFRL enterprise, most are independent and specific to individual directorate missions and investment priorities.
The directorates are now coming together to answer the call to deliver enterprise-wide, cost-effective, “speed with discipline.”
To promote, organize, and accelerate execution of AFRL’s Digital Transformation, Wright Brothers Institute is providing AFRL teams with access to assistance and support for facilitating collaboration within and across teams, maintaining better contact with the broader AFRL community, facilitating engagement across multidisciplinary communities, and engaging in rapid innovation-based problem solving.
AFRL put out the call to its Partnership Intermediaries. Commonly called PIAs, these non-profit organizations work under Partnership Intermediary Agreements (PIAs), a special type of contract with AFRL. PIAs serve many roles related to innovation, technology transfer, and horizon scanning, and work to connect and foster cooperation among industry, academia, and state and local government entities to address Air Force challenges.
WBI collaborated with AFRL PIAs BRICC, Doolittle, and New Mexico Tech to help AFRL plan, organize, and facilitate a large, complex, cross-organizational workshop to reinvigorate its digital transformation effort.
The event was held at the Doolittle facility in Niceville, Florida, November 8-10, 2021. Workshop outcomes exceeded expectations, building tremendous momentum for this critical AFRL initiative.
During the workshop the PIA facilitators guided the AFRL discussions around their digital transformation goals and captured and summarized the outcomes of those discussions. The complexity of the problem at hand and the fact that many participants were working together for the first time demanded a very flexible approach. Again, the PIAs rose to the occasion, working with AFRL workshop leaders to revector the workshop on the fly to keep it moving toward the needed outcomes.
By workshop end the AFRL team, supported by its PIA partners, had gone from four loosely defined goals to prioritized objectives with accompanying candidate projects and desired key results — a tremendous accomplishment for just three days from a “cold start.” These outcomes created a solid foundation for the AFRL digital transformation effort going forward.
The AFRL team first reached out to its PIA partners just 11 work days prior to the planned workshop start. The PIAs kicked into gear, identifying respective leads, and establishing a battle rhythm to quickly plan while maintaining full synchronization with the AFRL team. By combining their expertise and working together effectively with AFRL’s Gartner support team, the PIAs formulated a viable workshop design and were ready for execution ahead of deadline.