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The Army CTSF (Central Technical Support Facility) Advanced System Engineering team ran its first Data Review Boards in April 2004, to examine the data loads that are produced by ACSIS (Army C4ISR Simulation and Initialization System). Although the Army runs many types of review boards, the concept of a review board centered on data is new. The Data Review Board concept was pioneered by Symbolic Systems.
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Symbolic employees serve as key members of the ACSIS team, specializing in data quality analyses of the data from various authoritative data sources that are used to initialize the Army’s digitized battlefield systems. Since the data, which provides the network information needed to communicate on the battlefield, is provided by a number of sources and is used by a variety of systems with different communications requirements, the company saw a need for a final review of the data to confirm its accuracy and completeness. According to Frank Ponzio, Symbolic’s president and leader of the ACSIS data harmonization team, “When data errors are caught early, the overall cost to the Project Manager office developing the system is lower, the cost and time of testing is reduced, and the chances of a communications problem on the battlefield is greatly diminished. Running the Data Review Board takes a minimal amount of time and effort when compared against the potential savings that can be reaped.”
The ACSIS Advanced System Engineering Data Review Board provides a forum for a formal collaborative review of initialization data products by stakeholders, including the ACSIS team members, battlefield systems representatives, and the CTSF testing team. The goal is to allow stakeholders to review the initialization data information that will be used by the battlefield systems prior to its being loaded, in order to catch any issues or errors with the data before testing.
These first meetings were to review initialization data that will be used by systems that will be communicating via the upper Tactical Internet. Participants reviewed reports that showed the data to be included, actual data load and script files, and graphical representations of the network. With a number of potentially serious issues resolved and a better understanding of what will and will not be included, the Advanced System Engineering team members are optimistic about the quality of the data loads provided to the test floor.
After the first review board, which uncovered over 30 action items, Randy Shane, the ACSIS Technical Lead and Architect, noted “issues uncovered today, that would otherwise have caused problems during the first few weeks on the test floor, can now be resolved before testing.” This not only saves time in a very tight schedule to test and deploy ABCS 6.4 “Good Enough” systems, it also save money. The test floor costs nearly $90K per day to run; delays on the test floor can cost ten of thousands of dollars.
ACSIS is the repository for initialization data that will be used in the PEO C3T digitized systems taking part in the ABCS 6.4 testing that started May 3. Data loads are the files that contain the network information that allow Warfighters to communicate with each other and the command tiers in the theater. These files must be loaded in or be available to each system so that messages, weather, intelligence, terrain, friendly/enemy locations, etc. can be transmitted and received. Data loads include, for example, the IP addresses, unit reference information, system name, and other key network and addressing data. Any mistake in this information causing communications errors on the battlefield can be life threatening.
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