The Department of Defense is wholly committed to digital transformation, a long-term change 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, this project is providing AFRL 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.
Over the past few months, 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.
BRICC, Doolittle, New Mexico Tech, and Wright Brothers collaborated with AFRL’s Gartner partners to design and execute a e workshop held at the Doolittle facility in Niceville, Florida, 8-10 Nov 2021. The workshop outcomes exceeded everyone’s 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.