The Center for Business Analytics is pleased to recognize Army Futures Command as an honoree of the 2023 Drexel LeBow Analytics 50 Awards. Read more about how Army Futures Command used analytics to solve a business challenge.
Submitter
Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Parlin, Analytic Support Branch Chief
Company
Army Futures Command
Industry
Defense
Business Challenge
As a new Army headquarters, Army Futures Command needed an information environment for its success, requiring technologists to work closely with domain experts through rapid iterations to implement modern data, information and knowledge management processes and technologies that deliver quantifiable near-term improvement to priority command decision processes.
Analytics Solution
Leveraging Azure PaaS and Army Futures Command’s data science environment, the analytic teams were able to engineer critical decision support analytic pipelines that digitally transformed staff processes, enabling better and faster decisions. This often meant transforming siloed, static processes into digital workflows that standardize data at the point of capture; provide robust data transport, storage and telemetry; and deploy analytic decision support. Army Futures Command’s engineering fundamentals are such that with each new analytic pipeline established, a data ecosystem is built, providing increased data relations and richness and allowing analysts to find insights in ways that were previously not possible.
Impact
The analytic support division has grown the Command’s data ecosystem 10-fold in the last 12 months, and with the digital transformation of over 10 workflows, it has allowed staff sections from across the headquarters to reduce staff and become more performant with an estimated 700+ staff hour savings each month. However, this work has done more than reduce staff hours. It marks the first steps toward establishing the culture, engineering and governance of a modern, data-centric organization by providing the Command a single source of truth data ecosystem; streamlining and reducing reporting channels for subordinate units; establishing an enterprise-level analytic capability; and perhaps most importantly, enabling the most valuable resource — people — by relieving them of making trade-offs between the time they spend processing data and building decision support products with the time they spend conducting analysis and interpretation.