Pentagon Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) Radha Plumb is rolling out a new plan to bring in more companies to support the Defense Department’s (DoD) effort to scale its data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – with DoD’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) as the first program in line for support.
The new Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR) will be a multi-vendor ecosystem that enables industry and DoD to integrate data platforms, development tools, services, and applications “in a way that preserves government data ownership and industry intellectual property.”
“Open DAGIR brings the best industry has to offer to the Department,” Plumb stated in a May 30 announcement.
“It allows us to ensure enduring access to government-owned, contractor-operated technology stacks and infrastructure and retain data rights while also maximizing the ability of other companies to develop applications with government data,” she said.
DoD will initially leverage the Open DAGIR ecosystem to support the data infrastructure and applications that support CJADC2.
According to Plumb, Open DAGIR ensures the department can leverage innovative industry solutions from software developers in both the traditional and nontraditional defense industrial base “to create capabilities for our warfighters and decision makers.”
“Combined with our experimentation-based approach to capability development, we aim to give industry front-row access to both our data and our users to develop relevant and timely software for decision advantage,” she said.
DoD’s roll out of Open DAGIR comes days after the agency made several awards on mission command applications for combatant commands.
One of those awards was a $480 million contract by the Army to Palantir for its Maven Smart System prototype. The prototype would “rapidly and securely onboard third-party vendor and government capabilities into the government owned, contractor-operated data environment to meet priority Combatant Command digital needs.”
“CDAO plans to explore similar approaches to enabling enduring access to infrastructure for enterprise analytics and federated tactical data in the future,” DoD said.
To identify solutions to priority warfighter needs, the CDAO will leverage its Global Information Dominance Experiment series to assess and where appropriate select fresh solutions to add to the Open DAGIR ecosystem. This will begin with an industry day in mid-July.
