I enthusiastically accepted the opportunity to become the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) for the new Defense Systems Information Analysis Center (DSIAC), which is now rapidly expanding the combined capability of its legacy components. DSIAC is exploring new and creative methods to significantly improve systems and processes to collect, analyze, synthesize, disseminate, and communicate scientific and technical information (STI) to meet the current and future needs of researchers, engineers, and program managers in the Defense research, development, and acquisition communities.
One such example is DSIAC’s implementation of Communities of Practice, which leverages a wide variety of community-centric tools and methods to enable a collaborative, real-time awareness of evolving technical challenges and developments and enhanced STI sharing. The enormously increasing volume and availability of STI from digital media have vast implications and demand new approaches to accelerate the translation of data-to-decisions, provide rapid and accurate solutions to complex operational problems, save resources, reduce the acquisition timeline, and meet urgent Warfighter needs.
To help meet this challenge, DSIAC is implementing a wide range of authorized user self-service and assisted STI services that provide quick answers and are optimized for cost-efficient reuse of existing information to eliminate duplicative activities. Although the pace of technology development worldwide is overwhelming, it is the United States’ tenacity at maintaining our capabilities in research and engineering discovery, innovation, and transition that is a key tenant in maintaining our leadership in Defense.
DSIAC is also strategically positioning its efforts to monitor, access, and extract global STI to analyze trends, predict future directions, avoid technological surprise, and empower our capabilities to speedily enable new or extended military capabilities. In doing so, the IAC has certainly assumed leadership for an enterprise that represents a cross section of many Department of Defense critical core competencies.
Finally, in an environment of increasingly disruptive change, DSIAC has carefully engineered into its organization foundation the agility to respond to that change and the capability to anticipate and proactively create the change needed for the dynamic Defense Systems environment.