Interview transcript:
Keoki Jackson This is all about satisfying, in our case, warfighter demands and the mission needs and the operational needs that they face every day when they’re employing new technology systems. So what is a valley of death? I actually like to think of it more as, you know, a whole bunch of ditches of death in a desert where you’ve got sandstorms and a whole bunch of other things going on. So it’s not that there’s a big valley that you have to cross, but more that you have to do all of these different things, often in sequence. They’re complicated. And so what’s happening, if you think of us as a vehicle in the acquisition process: You’re stripping the tires, you’ve destroyed the transmission, and then you’ve worn all the paint off, and then eventually everybody gives up because you just can’t get over the finish line there. So what are some of those problems? And do we have the right technology solution, you know, to an actual mission problem, or is it just technology for technology’s sake? Do we understand really what the warfighter needs, those requirements that are validated against the particular problems that they have? Can you make it? Can you actually produce it to the speed, the scale and at the cost point that you need? And then finally, does the warfighter actually know how to use it? Will they be able to employ it in a real mission-operational scenario? So to get across this valley, or the ditches of death, those are the kinds of questions that you have to address along the way.
Terry Gerton That is really helpful and I’ve never heard it described as the “ditches of death,” but I think that is much more accurate. And the way you describe it, one of the problems that persists is the sequential acquisition process. By the time you get close to that last ditch, who knows if anybody still needs what you thought you were building? So what is MITRE’s new transition maturity framework and how does that purport to help DoD solve this problem?
Keoki Jackson So the transition maturity framework combines a set of, I’d say, fairly well-established different maturity levels, but adds in some new pieces. And then what it does is it packages it all together in a set of processes and toolkits that allow a science and technology manager or program manager to actually apply these pieces at the place that they’re needed along that journey that I described, so they know what they’re supposed to be doing at any given point to actually make a difference. And also, they can measure how they’re doing along that process. So think about it this way — we’re hacking the complexity of the defense acquisition system so that America’s technologists can actually focus on solving technology problems and getting those capabilities to the warfighter instead of navigating the twists and turns of the acquisition system. So let me give a a few specifics on that. I mentioned those different readiness levels, and I think everybody or many people are familiar with the technology readiness level. How mature is the actual technology itself? But you also have to think about things like manufacturing readiness level. That gets at the producibility at the cost, the scale and the schedule that are required. So that’s technology and manufacturing readiness level, and then there’s a transition readiness level, which says, you know, is it actually navigating the steps for the acquirers, the program executive officers, the program managers on the government side? So, on top of those standard elements, now we’ve added two additional dimensions, if you will. And so this is on what I call the requirer side. And we’re actually in the process in the Department of War right now of simplifying the entire requirements development process to focus really on those mission needs and challenges. And so now we talk about a requirements readiness level. Is the technology actually aligned to those mission needs? And then finally, and this is critically important because of that last step to adoption, the warfighter readiness level, the WRL — has the technology actually shown that it’s ready to be demonstrated, tested and adopted? And so this gets to a lot of the things that technologists often don’t think about. Do we have the doctrine that’s required to employ that technology? Do we have a concept of operations? Do we have the logistics in place to make sure that it can be used? Do we have the trainings so that the people are going to use this technology actually know what they’re supposed to do and how to use it? So those now are all individual steps along in this transition and technology maturation framework that allow this to be employed.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Keoki Jackson, he’s senior vice president at MITRE National Security. Give us a feel for how this framework actually gets used in practice.
Keoki Jackson So I’d like to maybe talk a little bit about the specific application. And I want to highlight this was developed by the Operational Energy Innovation Organization, with the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment branch. And so OEI for short — they’re the ones that are charged with coming up with solving many of the energy and power problems that warfighters face in the field. But that means taking a lot of advanced technology. And what they don’t have in there, they don’t have these large acquisition programs like a next generation air dominance fighter or something like that that’s going to pull those through. So they need to be matching, along the way, all the time, the technologists with the industrial base with the end users. And so since 2012, they’ve actually been developing and maturing this idea, this maturation framework to be able to employ their new technologies and get them out into the field. So I have to give kudos to OEI for really taking an idea and then bringing it to their warfighting partners, but also developing something that now is usable by programs across the entire department.
Terry Gerton Want to go back to those five different readiness-level topics that you mentioned: technology, manufacturing, transition, requirements and warfighter readiness. Is it too simple to say that what you’re talking about is sort of the equivalent of moving from waterfall software development to agile development, where you get everybody around the table, you do rapid cycles and things move a little more quickly, and everyone is engaged in the conversation from stage to stage?
Keoki Jackson You’re exactly right, because … you don’t want to bolt on the warfighter readiness at the end. You need to be thinking about all of these things in parallel. But the important thing to note with the transition maturity framework is there are specific activities that you do need to do at different points in time, and you may be at different readiness levels in each of those five dimensions that we talked about. So what the framework gives you is an easy-to-use process and toolkit for identifying, at each step and each maturity level across those dimensions, what are the specific activities that I need to prioritize right now as a technology development or program manager? And so that gives you a menu, it gives you the prioritization, and it gives you a way to think about the problem that’s very tailored to the steps that you might be at at any particular time.
Terry Gerton That’s helpful. There also seems to be another trick to this, and MITRE often emphasizes its “zero-stake neutrality.” And as you’re thinking about getting all of these different groups together more regularly in the development of a weapon system or a product or whatever, there are increasingly very different commercial interests represented at each of those stages. So how does that impact the effort to scale these programs? And why is zero-stake neutrality so important in that process?
Keoki Jackson Thanks for asking that, Terry. So MITRE operates the National Security Engineering Center, FFRDC, that’s federally funded research and development center. And as a nonprofit, we maintain a strict neutrality and we’re free from organizational and financial conflicts of interest that would cause us to pick a particular solution or particular winner, other than what’s best for the department and what’s best for the warfighter. And so that allows us — because we’re not competing with any of the stakeholders in this, the commercial solution providers with the new defense tech entrants, with our defense industrial base — we’re able to bring together both the key government stakeholders, these are the requirements developers, these are the warfighters, these are the acquisition process experts, and bring them together with our traditional defense industrial base providers, as well as these new and emerging companies with great ideas, but have no idea how to navigate the complexity of the acquisition process, getting from getting in the door to actually getting something out to a war fighter. So MITRE’s convening ability and the ability to systems engineer processes that really look at what are the things that are needed at each step of the way and how do they fit together in a way that actually produces the desired outcome? That’s the advantage of having the neutrality that you talked about, but also the ability to take a step back and a real systems view. Because at the end of the day, we need to get away from these one-off solutions and what I’d call random examples of success to something that’s a lot more systematic and strategically important in defense acquisition.
Terry Gerton So you mentioned that the transition maturity framework was piloted in sort of a small way. What’s next for it? How does it scale up now to be a key enabler of major acquisition programs?
Keoki Jackson That’s a great question. So as I noted, this started in OEI, but it’s actually being bridged out to a lot of different areas now. So let me give you a couple examples. One is we’ve got a tool called Omni that actually allows you to manage this process and gives you the progress as well as the data-driven insights. So now you’ve got a tool that can be transplanted into different acquisition organizations and S&T organizations. Some of the things that we’re working on right now are particularly focusing on bringing in new entrants and new defense technology type companies, the startups, the people who are less familiar with the department. So we think there’s a great opportunity on that front to bring in advanced new commercial solutions much faster. And the second is adopting this to, in particular, software development and agile software development. So much of what the department needs and is acquiring today is effectively software-defined and software-centric. So this is obviously a huge area of focus in terms of getting transition out to the warfighter.
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