With thousands of business systems to integrate, there were non-standard interfaces, duplications, legacy technologies, and a culture of different units pulling their own data for decision making. Together, Booz Allen and DoD developed Advana—a unified platform that makes data discoverable, understandable, and useful for advanced analytics to meet critical mission and business challenges across all levels of the department.
To overcome the challenge of disparate, raw data across the organization, from spreadsheets to data warehouses, Advana aligns data sets to the right category (e.g., “logistics” or “medical”), and then converts them to a common data model in a staging environment. The system puts that quality data into workspaces where users can run their own analytics.
Today, this managed data service supports more than 7,000 users across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and takes in data from more than 120 DoD systems—providing a flexible and automated framework for data acquisition, data engineering, and governance. It allows Department analysts to identify high-risk funds, automates the process for reviewing quarterly obligations at the Pentagon, and makes it possible to manage business and financial information like a commercial enterprise.
While Advana is a web-based tool that doesn’t requires users to download anything to use the platform, the next generation will involve a move to a cloud environment to allow for greater scale, more powerful analytics, and more advanced automation.
