Data-Driven Decision Support Tools

Challenge

Organizations across the world are seeing exponential growth and use of data to inform decision-making. Developing digital tools to aggregate, analyze, and provide visualization of the resulting information are needed to maximize the benefits of this megatrend. The program offices managing the acquisition of the United States' most advanced weapon systems have enormous amounts of data without necessarily having the tools to take the advantage of that data. Guidehouse has shepherded several of these programs through this digital transformation, including a strike aircraft, a new fighter, a tactical airlifter, and the US' newest training aircraft.

The clients typically operate their multi-billion-dollar budgets and centrally manage their program office through six functional areas. Historically, these functional areas were managed with a combination of manual and functional-centric systems and processes. This results in manpower-intensive efforts, a distinct lack of timely information needed to oversee and manage each function properly, and an inability to integrate data between functional areas.

Solution

These challenges — time spent gathering data, analyzing it, developing reports, and supporting ad hoc status requests — are not unique to these client organizations. To address these issues, the clients engaged Guidehouse to develop a digital transformation solution leveraging Agile methodologies. Guidehouse worked closely with the client to determine the vision for the Digital Decision Platform (DDP), which provides program leaders, and stakeholders with real-time, ready-to-access program metrics for rapid analysis, and powerful evidence-driven decision-making for the program. These applications are designed through user-driven interactions that allow data and risk-informed decisions to be made while also speeding up the decision-making cycle. Along with the DDP front end, the Guidehouse team employs cutting-edge data analytics and methodologies (machine learning, natural language processing, etc.) to provide the client with new data insights. Throughout development, we implement open-source code development, allowing future iterations of the product to be modified to meet changing and evolving user needs. Additionally, we use software systems already available to the client to accelerate development and avoid lengthy delays to obtain authority to operate.

Impact

In the case of the strike aircraft program, Guidehouse was able to replace the client's old conference room filled with post-it notes with a new Digital War Room. Success in this program, the DoD's largest ever, led to Guidehouse using the same approach to streamline dozens of spreadsheets previously used to manage finances and Government Furnished Property in easy-to-use dashboards to provide decision-quality information for a new fighter program. We were also able to completely revamp the data storage and workflow systems for both an airlift modernization program and a fighter acquisition program.

Through these efforts, the Guidehouse team was able to help clients obtain enterprise-wide benefits through the following:

• Created New Data Connections — Across the organization from previously siloed data sets, allowing users to identify underperforming areas and organizational risk factors quickly.
• Enabled Predictive Capabilities — By visualizing data in a continually evolving framework, allowing leaders to speed their decision-making cycles and implement mitigation strategies ahead of the risk curve.
• Provided Quick Access to Data — Reduced the time spent creating and waiting for reports and analyses.