6

Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations

The following section aggregates the conclusions and recommendations outlined in this report. The study committee was tasked with the following:

• Examining the Department of the Air Force’s (DAF’s) proposed strategies and roadmaps for achieving digital transformation (DT) in the next decade,
• Evaluating two use case examples to showcase the current state of DAF’s digital adoption progress,
• High-priority common elements to aid in the acceleration of DAF DT, and
• Identify opportunities and challenges for the creation of a unified DAF digital enterprise.

The first task, examining DAF’s proposed strategies and roadmaps for achieving DT in the next decade, was addressed in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 reviewed Air Force Materiel Command’s Digital Materiel Management initiative as well as various strategies and plans for digital engineering (DE) throughout the product life cycle. The committee found that despite the presence of promising initiatives and “pockets of excellence” sprinkled throughout the DAF, the DAF lacks a comprehensive strategy for DT. That led to the committee’s primary conclusion:

Overarching Conclusion: Although the Department of the Air Force has established numerous elements that support a digital enterprise with pockets of excellence in some centers, the efforts under way are not on a trajectory to achieve a unified capability that serves the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force with a

seamless digital thread across the system life cycle and commands, due to lack of a common high-level leadership, strategy, architecture, and consistent funding.

The second task, evaluating DAF’s digital adoption to date through two use case examples, is addressed in Chapter 4. The committee examined Air Force Sustainment Center’s digital ecosystem and Boeing’s T-7A Red Hawk Advanced Trainer. These two use cases are representative of the current state of DAF’s digital adoption.

Conclusion 4-1: The Air Force Sustainment Center (AFSC) has conducted a 5-year effort to utilize Digital Engineering to integrate all aspects of depot sustainment, representing one of the most mature digital transformation efforts in the Department of the Air Force (DAF). AFSC is reaping benefits of these efforts and is a representative “pocket of excellence” whose efforts have not been duplicated elsewhere in the DAF.

Conclusion 4-2: The T-7A program is a representative use case showing the state of the Department of the Air Force’s (DAF’s) digital transformation efforts because it showcases the use of integrated digital engineering (DE) applications to realize program benefits and points to further advantages that could be realized in future contracts. There is nothing unique about the T-7A example that precludes the same approach and benefits for other DAF programs. The DAF benefited from Boeing/Saab’s application of digital engineering DE, and the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) was able to conduct remote verification of some system-level requirements by DAF subject-matter experts. AFLCMC is also effectively applying an enterprise-wide digital engineering DE platform. However, the limitations of the contract impeded the ability of AFLCMC to most efficiently incorporate Boeing’s model-based systems engineering into the Air Force Sustainment Center’s support infrastructure.

The third task, identifying a small number of high-priority common elements, is addressed in Chapter 3. This chapter introduced five of these elements: leadership and adoption culture, funding and incentives, software and data, hardware and secure information technology, and metrics. Further discussion of these elements, including sample questions and how they would apply to a hypothetical “ideal” use case, can be found in Appendix E.

Conclusion 3-1: The committee identified several high-priority common elements that may aid in the acceleration of digital transformation: leadership and adoption culture, funding and incentives, software and data, hardware and secure information technology, and metrics.

Conclusion 3-2: Leadership and organizational culture play pivotal roles in the successful adoption of digital transformation (DT). Effective leaders embed DT

into their long-term strategic vision and resourcing and integrate initiatives with acquisition strategies, training programs, and funding mechanisms. Ideal DT organizational culture combines training, collaboration, and ongoing policy and communication engagement.

Conclusion 3-3: Strategically aligned funding mechanisms and incentives encourage successful adoption of digital transformation initiatives at scale. The ideal mechanisms evaluate the return on investment for digital transformation efforts, consider simultaneous impacts from centralized and decentralized funding authority, and incentivize feedback for continuous learning and accountability.

Conclusion 3-4: Reliable and innovative digital efforts require collaborative, interoperable software and data standards driven by sustained consistency management of system and engineering artifacts with considerations for data ownership, security, and scalability.

Conclusion 3-5: Success in digital near-term operational needs and long-term scalability requires standardized, secure, and scalable hardware and a resilient, secure information technology infrastructure. The ideal strategy for hardware and secure information technology includes a target architecture to support scalability, existing and legacy infrastructure, sustainment, cybersecurity assessments, and stakeholder integration.

Conclusion 3-6: An established robust framework of metrics assesses both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. Time horizon, measurability, relevance, diagnosticity, and feedback-driven adjustability provide quality attributes of metrics. Measurability, relevance, and diagnosticity are important metric qualities, but are not themselves metrics.

Additionally, the committee made the following recommendation on DT metrics:

Recommendation 3-1: The Department of the Air Force Digital Transformation Office should establish initial sets of digital transformation metrics for legacy and new systems that are measurable, relevant, and enable diagnosis of state, status, and health. They should then continue to iterate, improve, and adjust these metrics at regular intervals.

The final task, identifying challenges and opportunities toward creating a unified DAF-wide digital enterprise, is addressed in Chapter 5. This chapter examines two sets of factors—engineering factors and organizational factors. More detail

motivating the engineering factors can be found in Appendix F. The committee begins with the recommendation that DAF leaders embed DT into their strategic vision and communications.

Recommendation 5-1: Department of the Air Force (DAF) leaders should embed digital transformation into strategic visioning, requirements, resourcing, and communications to ensure continuity across leadership transitions, using governance, policy, and roadmap alignment that is iteratively updated to maintain momentum. The DAF should clearly define new roles and responsibilities and who will fill them, including the roles of a consistency manager and data curator. Successful digital transformation will address the critical challenges of intellectual property ownership, stakeholder involvement, use of tools and associated engineering data, and culture.

The first organizational factor is leadership, both within programs and at higher echelons of the DAF. The lack of a designated officer or senior leadership position specifically accountable for DT results in a diffusion of responsibility, with no single entity empowered to direct acquisition executives (e.g., program executive officers) or enforce the adoption of enterprise capabilities. This leadership vacuum leads to inconsistent application of digital tools and methodologies, limits innovation, and hinders the ability to establish and maintain digital continuity across the DAF. A full DT effort requires a comprehensive strategy that will drive an enterprise-wide architecture supported by standard policies, tools, and processes. In some firms, corporate leadership can exert authority to drive strategy across divisions, business units, and functional areas. The committee recommends that the DAF designate an officer or senior leader to lead its DT efforts and establish an enterprise-wide strategy.

Recommendation 5-2: The Secretary of the Air Force should designate an officer or senior leadership position within the Department of the Air Force headquarters with accountability to lead digital transformation for both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, establish an enterprise-wide digital strategy and common mission architecture elements with standardized platforms and integrated tools. This position should have sufficient resources with operational and technical expertise and experience and the authority to direct program executive officers to use the enterprise capabilities.

The second organizational factor is the budgeting process, across various levels of the DAF. The lack of an enterprise-wide strategy has led to DAF DT efforts being funded through a variety of sources—occasionally budget dollars,

but more commonly fallout or discretionary funds. The committee recommends that the DAF formally allocate resources through the Program Objective Memorandum process.

Recommendation 5-3: U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force Service Acquisition Executives should formally ensure resources for digital engineering are included in the Program Objective Memorandum input.

The third organizational factor is the DAF workforce. Workforce development, including learning, training, and skill development, across the DAF is an important part of the comprehensive DT strategy the DAF should develop.

Recommendation 5-4: The Department of the Air Force should develop a comprehensive strategy to foster an innovative digital transformation culture and ensure a workforce equipped with the necessary digital transformation knowledge to perform all critical functions. This strategy should prioritize recruiting and retaining talent by creating clear career paths, offering incentives for upskilling and reskilling and leveraging existing expertise.

Recommendation 5-5: To support continuous learning and collaboration, the Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should work with the Air Force Personnel Center to resource skill development pathways, establish digital sandboxes for hands-on experimentation, and implement adaptive processes that promote progressive knowledge sharing, a balance between technology innovation and standardization, and cross-functional engagement.

The fourth organizational factor is the role of commercial capabilities and how the DAF is currently leveraging these capabilities. The DAF would benefit from developing standardized contract requirements for data rights and access. The DAF should also regularly assess its use of commercial and open-source DE tools and software.

Recommendation 5-6: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should perform an ongoing enterprise-level/enterprise-wide assessment of its current use of commercial and open-source digital engineering tools, licenses, intellectual property, and use the results of that assessment to prioritize upgrades. The Department of the Air Force should repeat this process at regular intervals and monitor emerging technologies and solutions from the private sector.

Recommendation 5-7: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader for digital transformation should establish policy and standardized contract requirements to ensure that the Department of the Air Force has the necessary data rights and maintains ownership or access over relevant data from prime contractors. Government-owned or -accessible data repositories should be established.

The first engineering factor is the structure of what is built, including technical and architecture. To address this factor, the committee makes the following recommendation:

Recommendation 5-8: the Department of the Air Force’s robust, secure information technology infrastructure should support three different kinds of digital engineering baselines—systems as-built, systems as-programmed, and what systems may look like in the future.

The second engineering factor is the practice of actually building a system, including processes, tooling, and engineering data. To address this factor, the committee concludes and recommends the following:

Conclusion 5-1: Department of the Air Force digital enterprise capabilities and the ability to establish digital threads for each system are often limited by federal workforce access to digital models and artifacts that reside with the prime contractors. This can have significant adverse impacts on test and evaluation, and on efficient sustainment.

Recommendation 5-9: The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should prioritize curation of engineering data, leveraging existing tools and software whenever feasible and appropriate. When new tools are necessary, they should be developed with interoperability in mind, including open approaches to engineering data, and adhere to open standards (particularly for associated engineering data) to ensure seamless integration and collaboration.

The third engineering factor is the means to make judgments about what is built, including capability, security, and quality. The DAF must incorporate cybersecurity best practices while building its digital ecosystem, starting at the earliest stages of the life cycle.

Recommendation 5-10: The Department of the Air Force should more aggressively incorporate cybersecurity and build security into its digital

engineering ecosystem. This includes architectural choices that enhance resilience and security, accumulation of evidence to support more confident security-related test and evaluation, and modeling and threat-informed analysis to reduce attack surfaces, minimize vulnerabilities, and generally impose a high work factor on adversaries. Most importantly, security and resilience considerations should be considered at the earliest stages of program development. The Secretary-designated officer or senior leader should evaluate cybersecurity implementation.

Throughout this study, the committee spoke with dedicated, talented professionals across the DAF workforce and contractor community. The DAF is ready to embrace agility, foster innovation and build enduring resilience, but it requires a cohesive DT enterprise strategy, leadership, and culture in order to do so. The committee believes that its recommendations will help the DAF to best implement DT across its digital enterprise and fully capitalize on the potential of DT.

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