The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has been slowly identifying areas within its enterprise that would benefit from automation and other artificial intelligence-enabled improvements, but bringing those ideas to fruition will be a challenge, the agency’s finance chief said this week.
During the UiPath on Tour Public Sector Conference on April 17, DIA Chef Financial Officer Steven Rush explained there are a variety of emerging use cases and opportunities for technology-driven improvements across DIA’s processes and portfolios.
However, the operating nature of the U.S. intelligence community does not allow for the rapid adoption of innovative technologies, and that slows down the pace of innovation, Rush explained.
For example, one area that could benefit from AI improvements and automation at DIA is cybersecurity – a realm that remains largely a manual process for the agency.
“I think AI can really contribute into network configuration and edge computing. God forbid we get into some sort of conflict or hostilities with China. Edge computing is going to be critical and using AI to be able to configure networks at the edge is going to be critical, as well as monitoring the network,” Rush said.
Defense finance is another area where there’s much room for AI improvements and automation, Rush said.
Yet DIA remains in “the infancy of our AI journey. We used [automation and robotics] to transition travel voucher statements from our unclassified side to the high side, that has just barely scratched the surface. I want for the day when we’re living and working in the live dashboards,” Rush said.
Part of the challenge is that when it comes to IT and other technology investments, the agency’s business side must compete with intelligence operations, Rush explained.
“One of the challenges we have is, before AI is necessarily useful, we have to understand our processes. We have multiple legacy systems that don’t talk to one another. Understanding and how to communicate between those processes is critical,” Rush said.
DIA has been on “an 11-year journey to understand” all those complex processes, he added.
“I hope in the next couple of years we’ll be to the point where AI is a critical factor in just maintaining compliance and maintaining a clean or unmodified opinion on our audit, but it’s another area ripe for investment and innovation. The challenge, though, is just understanding our legacy systems and processes, so we know how to automate smartly,” Rush said.
Another factor to DIA’s slow pace in innovation is due to state of the agency’s workforce.
According to Rush, there are officials who are “afraid of having live dashboards where other people can see the information and analyze it and question it.” Simultaneously there’s also younger coworkers who want much more access to advanced tech to do their jobs, he added.
“So, that cultural challenge is real for us,” Rush said.
