By Geoff Fein
While the Navy’s Surface Warfare Centers are operating more closely with their Navy, military and federal agency customers, officials are also looking at how to do a better job working with industry.
From an open architecture perspective, the answer is to make sure the warfare centers provide qualified industries access to the work at the centers, Rear Adm. James Shannon, commander, Naval Surface Warfare Center, told Defense Daily recently.
Not every company is qualified for the most sensitive things the warfare centers might be working on for the Defense Department, he added.
Providing that access to the Navy’s data will create a level playing field and the ability to run fair competitions for the resources the service is willing to spend on industry’s solutions, Shannon added.
One way the Navy has been working to achieve these efforts has been through an automated approach to providing information.
That is being done through the Software, Hardware Asset Reuse Enterprise (SHARE) repository and SHARE II, Shannon noted.
Using commercially available software, SHARE II will enable industry developers to better understand and make sense of code stored in SHARE II.
“They can understand the context of the systems they are looking at,” Shannon said. “We’ve brought in the Naval Post Graduate School and all that brain power to help develop an ontology of how to make this software work. It’s sort of like our own Google without having Google do it for us.”
SHARE II went live earlier this year. The warfare centers are providing 75 percent of the funding for it with the remaining 25 percent coming from the Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems, Shannon said.
Aside from the automated approach using SHARE II, the Navy is reaching out to industry through actual face-to-face meetings and dialogue with company representatives, he added.
Last September in preparation for an event held in March ’10, the Navy Surface Warfare Centers held a Science & Technology Day with industry. Shannon said the Navy laid out a lot of the S&T efforts the warfare centers are working on, such as in basic research.
“We want industry to see what we are doing there so that they can see where the Navy is putting its own money back into the Navy,” Shannon said. “This is like the Navy’s own IRAD (internal research and development). We are putting our own [research and development] back into our warfare centers, but we shared with industry what we are trying to do. That’s unique because industry doesn’t tell other industry members what they are doing for IRAD, so it’s a very unique way of approaching that.”
The Navy wants industry to know what the warfare centers are doing, Shannon added. “We want them to know we are willing to put our own…money, back into our warfare system.”
Shannon also encouraged industry to seek out warfare center subject matter experts. “You may want to talk to these people, to understand what they are doing. And we are certainly willing to share with you what they are doing because it only benefits us in the long-run if people all understand that effort.”
More than a year ago, Vice Adm. D.C. Curtis, then head of the Surface Warfare Enterprise, challenged Shannon to bring in industry to get a better understanding of the surface Navy’s needs. “What we ended up doing, we brought in all of our subject matter experts, our S&T leaders within the warfare centers,” Shannon said.
Out of a workforce of 15,000, that was about 150 people Shannon reached out to. They were brought together for a two-day, government-only, meeting.
“These are all individuals who have their own S&T efforts going on. They are engineers and scientists; their heads are down in their problems,” Shannon added.
The group was brought together to better understand what was going on at the warfare centers, he said. As a result, the group, on things totally unrelated to their own field, question whether enough is being done in a particular area, or more importantly, Shannon said, see relationships between different and separate efforts.
“They were able to ask hard questions, develop a network within our own community, and recognize the work each other [are doing]. It was a good team effort,” he said.
As a result of that gathering, warfare center officials began to ask what were the lessons learned from the meeting. Shannon said clearly one lesson is that the warfare centers need to keep doing similar gatherings.
At its March S&T Day, more than 100 people from 78 companies and from 20 different states looked at approximately 20 S&T objectives that the surface warfare enterprise is interested in, Shannon said.
He noted that bringing together industry representatives and warfare center personnel to share information was a true open architecture effort. He hopes this will be the beginning of similar outreach efforts from industry.
“We reduced a lot of the formality. It didn’t really cost us anything and we got everybody to come together,” Shannon said. “In the end, there was a lot of information sharing. When you bring all that together the power is much better.
“When you hear the CNO say he is not for a fair fight, he’s for an unfair fight, that’s our asymmetric advantage,” Shannon added. “Americans bring very innovative solutions to very complex problems. When you bring all these people together they come up with some very good ways to solve some of the very big problems that we face.”
But it is important to bring varying disciplines together and not just the same disciplines, Shannon noted. “That’s how you avoid the group think. That’s how you avoid the same stale answer.”
“We have to keep doing that and we are going to keep doing that,” he said. “The warfare center is going to lead that effort, it will be part of our outreach.”