Uncovering the Future of Army Data and Communications

In November, chapter members received a glimpse into the future of Army data and communications courtesy of Alan Hansen, chief technology officer of the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD). Hansen presented several key insights on the next generation Unified Data Ecosystem (UDE), a burgeoning "data-intensive analytic architecture that will converge the Army's intelligence and operations data enterprise." Historically, silos were created within the organization by legacy equipment and tailored mission applications, which led to a lack of collaboration between Army divisions. This also led to barriers in understanding and fully exploiting collected data. With the implementation of the UDE, the Army hopes to remove these silos and provide ubiquitous access to all data, to better benefit the warfighter. The UDE will work off of a "converged, extensible, modular, scalable, secure database that operates in real-time, encompasses all data types and traverses numerous transport methods," making data instantly available on a global scale. This new architecture will also provide a comprehensive data fabric, global knowledge graph and machine learning services framework. Work on this program will be ongoing between FY19 and FY21, and performance will be overseen by the newly formed Army Futures Command, Network Cross Functional Team (CFT).

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