Defense Industry Tackles Digital Transformation

Show Notes

Digital Transformation is creating new business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet the market requirements. Technology, data, and the cloud are concepts that have come together so that we can tackle information together. A fundamental piece of digital transformation is getting to a point where we share our information and have a framework where it's not just our information, but collective information that is shared by the community. In this episode, podcast host Ken Miller sits with Mr. Ryan Tintner, Vice President of Digital Transformation at Northrop Grumman Corporation. They define what digital transformation means from an industry perspective as they move through the concept of all-domain operations. Ken and Ryan discuss how digital transformation means different things to different missions, and Ryan explains how it helps an organization integrate technology, people, and processes to do everything faster and more effectively. Open systems architecture is an important piece of digital transformation, and this episode expands on what it means in sustainment and the life cycle costs of technology and systems and what it all means for the DoD. 

Creators & Guests

Host

Ken Miller

AOC Director of Advocacy & Outreach, Host of @AOCrows From the Crows' Nest Podcast

Producer

Laura Krebs

Editor

Reese Clutter

What is From the Crows' Nest?

This podcast features interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crows Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. On today's episode, we are going to discuss digital transformation and what it means from an industry perspective as we move toward this concept of all-domain operations.

Ken Miller (00:29):
Before I introduce my guest, I want to put a plug in for our upcoming AOC 2021 Symposium and Trade Show happening here in Washington, DC on November 30th to December 2nd. Not surprisingly, the theme for this year's show is all-domain operations integrating effects across the spectrum. From the Crows Nest will be there and we'll be interviewing a number of the speakers in attendance. And we'll be releasing a flurry of episodes that week so that you won't want to miss. To learn more and to register, please visit crows.org/2021home.

Ken Miller (01:00):
All right. My guest today is Mr. Ryan Tintner, Vice President of Digital Transformation at Northrop Grumman. Ryan, it's great to have you on From the Crows Nest. Thanks for joining me.

Ryan Tintner (01:09):
Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.

Ken Miller (01:11):
We're going to talk a little bit about digital transformation. This is a topic that it applies differently depending on what you're focusing on from a network perspective and even a service perspective. So really appreciate having you on the show. And we want to talk a little bit about how industry is adapting to this because it's one thing to talk about how the military is transforming itself, but everything that they do certainly has a direct link to how industry needs to respond. And so it's great to have you on the show.

Ken Miller (01:38):
To begin the conversation though, I want to kind of start to define what digital transformation is from an industry perspective. In previous episodes that we've had on From the Crows Nest, we've talked JADC2, we've talked in artificial intelligence, we've talked machine learning, we've talked open systems architecture, service strategies. Everything that we've talked about has a digital transformation angle to it. So from an industry perspective, could you define a little bit about what that means in terms of today's military fight in the threats that we face around the world?

Ryan Tintner (02:11):
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think you're right. Digital transformation in some ways is a loaded term. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. And we have to put that in kind of a definition there. So high level, to me, digital transformation is really how an organization or a group integrates technology people and processes to do everything faster and more effective. And when you say more effective, for us at Northrop Grumman, and really, I think for the industry at large within defense, it's all about the mission, right? So what is the actual mission impact we're trying to get to, and then understanding through the use of information, through the use of the latest in technology, how can we get there in a much more effective way.

Ken Miller (02:53):
Now, when you mentioned the mission, the mission is constantly changing too. If you look at what the Army's going through or the Air Force or Space Force now, their mission today is a lot different than it was even just five years ago in terms of what is required to them. And as you look forward, it's going to keep changing. So how does industry keep pace with understanding the mission needs of their customers?

Ryan Tintner (03:19):
Yeah, the reality is, I think as we all know, change is changing faster and faster, right? And so we need to be able to think further ahead and think faster than we ever have before. I know we spent a lot of time with our customers thinking about future missions and thinking about the future threat, trying to model what is that. Where information has been in the past, I think people model those first-order effects, what is needed to defeat a certain threat or what is needed to meet a certain requirement?

Ryan Tintner (03:48):
Where we have to get to now, is modeling and using information to look at second and third-order effects because the pace at which the mission is changing, I like how you put that, is forcing us to think a lot further down the road. The budget environment requires us to do it. And frankly, the pace of the threat requires us to do it. So there's a couple things coming together all at the same time. And I think it's on us in industry to help bring forward the concepts in digital transformation to allow our customer to look at their mission and really decide how we're going to proceed as a team together.

Ken Miller (04:23):
So when you mentioned the concepts of digital transformation, what are some of the concepts that you're looking at?

Ryan Tintner (04:29):
So it's all about information and data and how we use it together. And it really wasn't until the last number of years here, where technology and data and the cloud, and really all those concepts have come together so that we can actually tackle information together. So conceptually, getting to the point where we share our information and have a framework where it's not just our information, it's really a collective information that's shared by the community, fundamental piece of digital transformation. We talk about the ideas of having the authoritative sources of truth of information.

Ryan Tintner (05:02):
In the past, people may have considered what is the authoritative source of truth within my set of information. We need to come to a joint realization that the authoritative source of truth of information that we're talking about may exist in someone else's hands. So we need to start tackling the concept. You mentioned earlier, open architecture, intellectual property, how does this all exist in the future? And I think the necessity to access shared information is going to require that we change a bit of how we think.

Ken Miller (05:33):
It's interesting the way that you put it with authoritative sources of information and where that might reside, because when you deal with ubiquitous data, it's everywhere and anywhere, and you need to collect that. And you're not exactly sure what you're looking at, or maybe the quality of information, but you have to be prepared for it, being able to analyze it and provide that to your force and make sure and verify whether or not that's an authoritative source of information and be able to be able to act upon it. So you mentioned modeling. How difficult is it to model like, okay, here's what we're going to try to do in terms of collecting all this data and figuring out what to do with it, and then how do we most efficiently provide it to our customer to give them a capability that they can actually use that information to successfully execute a mission?

Ryan Tintner (06:19):
Yeah, I think you're right. It's quite challenging. The thing that makes it challenging is that it's not a problem that a single organization can tackle by themselves, right? We have to recognize that we're in this together. We've got to tackle it together. The other realization that we've had is there have been a variety of large programs that have started to tackle this problem, how do you really model things before you start to build them? Because you don't want to get into building things before you've looked at those second and third-order effects.

Ryan Tintner (06:47):
The realization that we've had is you can't do this again and again for every program and every customer pursuit out there. We need a strategy that we begin to, as a joint team between industry and the government, start to build on the foundations of information sharing. How do we actually have a strategy for trust of information, right? And once you have it, we talk a lot these days about cyber and about information protection, that's fundamental here. We have to know that the information that we're providing is the right information, right? It hasn't been altered and that we trust it. And it's got to make its way from the designers through to the operational information.

Ryan Tintner (07:25):
The other way that you do this is making sure that we have constant reverification and validation. So if you think about a program that goes in models from the very beginning, let's say you're modeling before you even put a bid in, to help your customer know that the solution that you're offering, you needed to have really trusted information that this is the right impact. And so we go, we share that through. When we actually go over the course of months and years, let's go validate and verify it so that we build trust into the system.

Ken Miller (07:55):
You mentioned strategies, and there was an Air Force vision, I guess, that was released earlier this year. There's, of course, the Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy, JADC2 strategy. There's a couple of strategies on digital transformation for the Army out recently. All of these strategies in some way or another talk about collaborating better with industry. What are some of the things that have been done to have kind of opened the door to being able to better collaborate and accomplish some of the things that you just mentioned?

Ryan Tintner (08:24):
There have been a number of things that have happened. And I'll stress here that digital transformation didn't start this year because the term has come out. It's been going on for a long time in the introduction of the way that we do CAD models, the way that we do computer-aided really everything. So we've come a long way. And one of the things that we've done for many years is start to have standards and come up with standards. But what happens, and I think even folks in the government are worried about, there are so many standards, right? At some point you need to go and have some commonality here.

Ryan Tintner (08:57):
And one of the places we've been working closely with the government is there are a number of people similar to Northrop who are very committed to digital transformation and coming up with standards. We don't want to have six different standards. So how do we come together and define those elements that really need to be the same and agree that this information means something and we mean the same thing by it? So that is something that it is on us as industry with our industry partners here too, to come together and say, there are places where we need to decide, this is not a competitive area. This is a, we're coming together. And we owe it to the government to say, here's the way we want to proceed in certain areas that will help tremendously.

Ryan Tintner (09:38):
But the second thing that when I think about some of the best successes in the early areas of digital transformation, when you start to have all this information available, the desire is that you communicate it, right? And it becomes available naturally. That's a bit of a paradigm shift. And I always say, I am willing to over-communicate this information. I'll make it all available, but now everyone else has to promise not to overreact to that information. That's a cultural shift. And at the core of digital transformation and at the core of a shift in how we think about information is culture.

Ken Miller (10:11):
It's a good segue. This might be a little bit of a roundabout way of getting to the next question, but I think that it's really important when you talk about culture and the effect that information has on culture. And you can see this a few episodes ago, we had on David Weinberger. We talked about artificial intelligence, machine learning and how that is changing our ability to think about problems and figure out solutions from a industry standpoint, as well as a social-cultural standpoint, because we can kind of see things that we never used to be able to see from more traditional methods. Could you talk a little bit about how artificial intelligence and machine learning, how that is changing, not just what we understand to be digital transformation today, but the effect that it's having on that culture of being able to anticipate kind of where the customer's going, where the threat is going?

Ryan Tintner (11:04):
Yeah. Artificial intelligence, it's a reality, it's a game changer. And when you think about in the past, and I'm sure you all discussed it, the way that the OODA Loop works across this, observe–orient–decide–act, that loop in the past used to be discreet steps that you would walk through, right? And then you would go back and you'd start to continue. Now, as the solutions are using artificial intelligence here to proceed in a much faster way, the definition of speed has completely changed, right? But as we start to develop systems with artificial intelligence and as the adversary is reacting using concepts of artificial intelligence, I liken it to the markets when the markets started having computers involved in trading. And the emergent properties of a system that happens forces us to think completely differently.

Ryan Tintner (11:55):
But when you also think back to when some of the earlier automated technologies were introduced into sensors, I remember electro optical cameras could be steered and it used to be all manual, but then they started adding in some automation into the systems and automatic detection. Culturally, people don't know how to handle that. And you don't want to trust it. We talked about trust earlier. I think how we integrate that into our life cycle, both into our lives and into our mission life cycle is something that you can't take for granted. It's something that you may be able to look at technically on paper and say, this is the right way to go. At the end of the day, it's all about the people. And it's all about helping us be smarter, move faster.

Ryan Tintner (12:38):
I remember a long time ago, the concept of we're swimming in sensors and drowning in data, right? It's the same thing here. How do we take all the information we have and not just have more information, but better information? When you think about the mission, and I started off this by saying all of our requirements for the way we look at digital transformation is based on the mission effect, at the end of the day, there's information that's provided to somebody who's going to do a very important mission. That's got to be crisp and correct. And the best way is to be able to have taken all of the data that came in and really assess it to its core. And that's going to require us to use things like artificial intelligence.

Ken Miller (13:15):
And it's also going to rapidly speed up the requirements for decision making. So you have to be able to make a decision probably faster than any human has really made a decision in the past and be able to integrate that into the workforce structure that you have, whether it's in the military or in the field or in industry itself. So from a workforce standpoint, how do the workforces have to come together though, on digital transformation? It's one thing to think about it from a technology standpoint, but the people themselves have to interact. Could you talk a little bit about how the workforces have to collaborate?

Ryan Tintner (13:48):
If you look at the classical way programs or large programs within the DoD have gone, there is your typical cycle from conceptual design to reviews, to each of the steps that you go after. And a lot of that has occurred in create a product, hand off a product, review a product. We are getting to a point, we're already there, where things happen collaboratively. So the idea of how we collaboratively design and review and get that feedback, it breaks a lot of the standard ways we know how to work together. We have a standard sort of contract of how we build a product, hand off a product, and review a product. And I think everyone's comfortable with it because it's very well understood. It's very serial. We know how to get to a step, validate a step and move on.

Ryan Tintner (14:37):
Culturally, the idea of being in a more sort of open source community, one where the feedback is asynchronous and we haven't necessarily completed every step before the next one started, it's a place that feels uncomfortable for a lot of people. It also has some massive advantages. And we have to get to that point where we're comfortable operating that way, but also working together to understand what guardrails do we need to put in place so that we can actually proceed together.

Ken Miller (15:06):
One of the things you mentioned in a previous question that I wanted to go back to was this notion of sustainment. In a previous episode, when we talked about open systems architecture, one of the topics that came up was how do you have standards, but still what does that mean for sustainment moving forward? Because lifecycle costs of technology and systems is a huge chunk of what DoD is spending money on. We all oftentimes think of new technology, what are you throwing out into the field in the next year or two that's going to help the war fighter, but then we have to sustain that oftentimes for decades. How is industry tackling the question of sustainment of technologies and capabilities that are critical to digital transformation for the next 10 to 15 years?

Ryan Tintner (15:50):
Sure. I'll tackle that in two pieces. There is technology that has yet to be designed and there's technology that already exists, both of which need the support of digital transformation, but you have to tackle them a little differently. So for new technology, I talked a little bit about designing in the model and what we need to be doing is designing in models that take into account sustainment of systems. And that's hard, because you need to actually be able to model everything in the early period. You have a lot of processing, a lot of concepts that need to be taken into account. And by the way, you also need some degree of verification and validation so that you know, that these impacts that you're looking at are true.

Ryan Tintner (16:30):
But when you do that for our customers' sake, we need to be looking at this before the final requirements are set. In a lot of cases, we will have had requirements that are set. We go design, develop and move forward, but we haven't truly considered the entire sustainment impact. And as most people know, there's tremendous cost in a program tied to the sustainment phases. So we can be a lot more effective by thinking about these items much earlier on.

Ryan Tintner (16:58):
But at the same point, both for new technology, as well as for existing technology, we want to be able to make much smarter sustainment decisions based on the information that exists. So that gets us toward the digital twin, where for a new technology, we can be thinking proactively about a digital twin, where we can continue to simulate and understand our physical systems using a virtual representation. But you can even do things like this for existing systems that are out there. And there's a variety of examples already, but this is somewhere kind of similar to the way the auto industry has gone. And if we're smarter about predictive maintenance, if we understand how our systems are reacting, and if we can even model out DMS and [PQDI 00:17:41] on system, so diminishing material supply of capabilities on there, when is the right time to refresh, it's not just at a certain prescribed timeframe like we've done in the past, but let's be really smart about what and when and how we refresh, you can have tremendous impacts, positive impacts for sustainment.

Ken Miller (17:59):
Could you talk a little bit about what digital transformation means for our understanding of electromagnetic warfare? Obviously this is AOCs mission, and this is why we're having the podcast, but I want to make sure that we do address it specifically because when we talk information, we're talking a wide range of capabilities and everything, but from electromagnetic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum operations is almost the backbone of a lot of what we want to do, making sure that we can maneuver in the electromagnetic spectrum. And that has huge implications for digital transformation. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Ryan Tintner (18:33):
Of course. Electronic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum warfare, I think it's one of the preeminent examples of where we must accelerate into digital transformation. A couple things are going on within EW right now. What classically had been different sensors and different domains of electronic warfare, especially now with the technology that's advancing within RF technology, those are all converging. So now you have lots of collectors of information and effectors of information out there, and we need to be bringing it all together so that we have a shared understanding of what the environment looks like. Similar to JADC2 that you discussed earlier and similar to the general concepts of digital transformation, we need to get our arms around understanding where information exists, what is the authoritative source of truth of it and getting it together quickly.

Ryan Tintner (19:25):
We also look at the battle space right now between us trying to rapidly develop our electronic warfare capabilities and the adversary equally quickly, if not even at a faster pace, adapting what they have there. And you talked about artificial intelligence. How do we get ahead of the loop here? We have got to leapfrog where our adversary is going, and I don't think we're going to do it iteratively and digital transformation is really at the core of it. What we need to do is go from an EW, what was rapid reprogrammability, how do we go and get new definitions of what we want to get much further forward? We want to be able to collect the information that's out there in real time. We want to have the algorithms running in real time, but ultimately we need to get much smarter, much faster and be able to simulate this so that we can leapfrog.

Ken Miller (20:14):
So you mentioned earlier a little bit about partnerships and you mentioned that obviously you're going to have competition in the marketplace, but there's so much going on, on the digital transformation front that it really goes beyond competition. I mean, there's a lot of opportunity out there for industry to work together in new ways to meet the needs of the customer. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about specifically what types of partnerships are out there and how you're working together?

Ryan Tintner (20:41):
Yeah, we're absolutely tackling this as a team. And I talked about that a little bit earlier. The partnerships really exist amongst, I'll call it the primes, right? They need to exist across the entire supply chain at all levels. And it needs to exist with our customer. And part of that cultural shift, which I've been watching happening in a great way is us all coming together as a team. Plenty of examples out there now where one company builds a component that integrates with another company or their platform, and then figuring out how we don't wait until the government pushes people together to go integrate. We take the models of what we're building. We take the information, we connect the systems. Plenty of examples out there, even in the open press where we have a lot of success by doing the digital integration earlier and then getting downstream faster. And that's going to become the norm going forward and not the exception.

Ryan Tintner (21:37):
It doesn't come without its pains, right? We are challenging the norms of intellectual property and people naturally thinking about, I will only give the information if it's an exception, versus let me give all the information, unless there's an exception as to why I don't need to give the information. It challenges those norms for probably good reasons. We always stop ourselves before we push information out the door. That's sort of the integration level.

Ryan Tintner (22:04):
But I'll talk to the other side of it, which is one of the things that takes development a long time is when one company within the supply chain develops something, finally delivers it, passes it across. We need to get to the point, and we are already there, where we are designing together in a shared system. We are integrating virtually together in a shared system. And unfortunately it's only getting harder with the cyber threats and with the concerns today that are very real and we have to take extremely seriously. So while the digital transformation community is pushing hard to say, share more information, the cyber community is also saying, there's more and more risk out there. So there's a balance that we need to work together and it's happening. We're working closely together, but it's more and more challenging every day to make sure we provide and protect.

Ken Miller (22:54):
So last question here. How do you prioritize then, where to focus corporate efforts on digital transformation? I mean, listening to what you're talking about, it almost feels like it's very easy to almost give yourself whiplash, trying to keep up with everything that's coming in and having to get out to the customer and stuff. So how do you prioritize that? And where do you see the value line moving forward with digital transformation?

Ryan Tintner (23:17):
Yeah. You very quickly in digital transformation can define an ocean to go and boil. There's a lot for us to do. And it's all really critical. The approach that we've taken is we took a while and really mapped it all out and he here's everything you could go do, and here's why, but we need to decide what the focus areas are going to be. And for us, we look at the mission first, right? We look at it and talk to the customers. We spend a lot of time talking with our customers, understanding what are the biggest impact we want to go after together. And when you look at the mission space that's coming up and some of the bigger challenges, we map value. You can map value in many different ways, but we're mapping it to really our customer's needs and our customer's requirements.

Ryan Tintner (23:57):
And very quickly, you'll get to things like, I need to be transformational in the way the program lifecycle flows, right? And when you trace that out, it has great impacts on all the other value areas that you could consider for your customer, for how much they can achieve. That's where we need to tackle first, because if you try and tackle something that is something different, if you try and tackle getting cost out of a system or doing something there, you're not going to achieve the final objective. So really, we start with the mission and then we go from there.

Ken Miller (24:29):
And I actually lied, that was not the last question. This will be the last question, but I wanted to follow up on that. As you prioritize kind of what you focus on, on digital transformation, what do you see as necessary for DoD to continue to do from a transformation perspective or a culture change perspective, that's going to be necessary for industry to be successful in its efforts to move digital transformation forward?

Ryan Tintner (24:54):
I think the government has a lot of initiatives going on to help us come together on standards. And I think it's going to be critical that we, together with the government's leadership, come together on some of the standards that we need. It's not about prescribing everyone using the exact same tool in the exact same environments, because that will ultimately stifle some of the innovation that industry is often doing. Every company out there now is working on their own innovation. We spend a lot of time and money to try and bring value forward in digital transformation innovation. And we don't want that to stop, but I do think we need to make some good decisions on the standards within each of the domains that will help us move forward together. That in of itself will help us to start sharing information.

Ryan Tintner (25:40):
I'd say everything right now needs to be focused on making sure that we can share information effectively so that we can jointly model our environments, we can jointly understand the situation that is out there. Really, a lot of this is about us having access and understanding all the information that's out there so that we can catch decisions earlier. We can make smarter decisions earlier. And that really leads me to this one other point about what the government, really, the partnership of us with the government can do. And that's when we think about requirements, we need to continue to come up with a way to have the necessary flexibility and requirements. We'll call them objectives, not requirements. Now that challenges the contracts community, but we need to make sure that we set up an environment where we can be agile, right? We want to able to move forward, use our information. And when we realize the path that we've been going down will not lead to the mission objective that we were planning on, whether it's sustainment costs, whether it's probability of detection, that we have the flexibility within our ecosystem to adapt very quickly.

Ryan Tintner (26:45):
And I think when I talked about everything, deriving from the mission, that's really the key. And I encourage, and I see great leadership within the government right now that we empower leaders, both within industry and the government that when we see something is not heading in that direction, not achieving the result, that we empower people to make the changes they need to change. That ultimately is what digital transformation and agile is all about.

Ken Miller (27:09):
Great. Well, thank you, Ryan, for joining me on From the Crows' Nest. I appreciate you taking time and talking about this very complex issue and breaking it down for us. And look forward to talking with you again in the future.

Ryan Tintner (27:21):
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the opportunity.

Ken Miller (27:25):
That will conclude this episode From the Crows' Nest. I want to thank my guest, Ryan Tintner from Northrop Grumman for joining me. It was a great conversation and one that we will be continuing with future guests here on From the Crows' Nest. To learn more about the AOC, please visit our website at crows.org. Thank you for listening.