Matt Benigni, chief data officer at the Army Futures Command (AFC), explained this week that he sees a path forward for further “maturity” in the organization’s digital engineering standards and practices.
Digital engineering comprises how the Army accelerates efforts to design and develop tools to help military personnel perform on the battlefield more efficiently. Benigni said an Oct. 11 DefenseNews event that digital engineering maturity is likely to come at the enterprise level of technology services.
“I think there’s a couple of things that we’re going to see mature over the next few years. One is the way we curate our standards,” said Benigni.
“We’re going to see a much more consortium-like model where we at the enterprise have the governance and the capability to share” standards “in a way that allows the diverse set of expertise across the command to submit issues, gain consensus, and be able to develop the level of complexity that we need to speed up engineering and practice,” the CDO said.
Benigni also said a lot is being learned through project convergence which involves decoupling software and hardware at the software layer.
“The next fundamental I think that we’re learning through project convergence is this idea of … decoupling software and hardware at the software layer, really decoupling the application layer, the data layer, and platform services,” said Benigni.
