Capability gap

First-class militaries the world over are recognising the need to make better use of the vast amounts of data that underpin all training activity. Yet many of these militaries are struggling to implement, or find tools to support, effective training data exploitation strategies and approaches.

In battle, competitive superiority is derived from an ability to secure and exploit information advantage. Preparing for battle should be no different. Recent military thinking has identified that armies should be making much better use of training information to secure advantage. Many other nations recognise the same issues, understand the importance of better exploiting valuable training data and seek tocapitalise upon it to optimise performance and achieve success on operations.

Yet, despite acknowledging this critical capability gap, many first-class armies are still struggling to put in place effective strategies and approaches to truly harness the power of their training data. For some, this is the result of limited resources. But it is also partly to do with the maturity of associated technologies and, possibly, because of institutional beliefs that existing approaches to both individual and collective training are already sufficient.

This requirement is not unique to the military domain. Within the past 10 years the commercial field of data analytics has emerged as a synthesis of computer science and statistics, both now necessary for dealing with complex, data intensive challenges.

Big Data – the term commonly used to describe this contemporary use of powerful processing techniques and artificial intelligence to derive value from large-scale, diverse datasets – has begun a transformational shift in modern society that has changed how businesses, governments and even sports teams evaluate their performance to secure advantage. Exponential increases in processing power and data availability continue to drive the creation of new analytical methods, tools and techniques that have transformative implications for learning research and practices.

Several first-class armies now recognise the need to make the same step-change. They recognise the potential for data to vastly improve not only training but also force development, experimentation, operational analysis, research and both the acquisition and in-service support of capabilities.

Solution

Hive has been specifically developed to meet these needs and is already in-service and helping armies to optimise their performance based upon its automated, intelligent capture, storage, analysis and presentation of vast training datasets in near real-time.

Hive is an innovative, cost-effective approach to delivering evidence, based upon intelligent, automated training data analysis, that stands up to rigorous scrutiny. It is unparalleled in its adaptive ability to automatically harvest, categorise, store, process and analyse vast amounts of objective and subjective, quantitative and qualitative data from across the live, virtual and constructive training environments and to present it in real-time by means of unique, flexible and innovative visual formats.

Its machine learning engine quickly identifies trends in training and rapidly delivers comprehensive and exploitable, context derived insights – enabling commanders to quickly spot and interpret trends from training and deliver far more proactive, realtime and supportive training interventions than are currently possible within traditional collective training progressions. These insights can be invaluable not just to the training community, but also to wider communities within force development, experimentation, research, operational analysis, acquisition and support activities – allowing data gathered once to be reused many times, by many parts of the organisation for many purposes: harvest once, use repeatedly.

Its machine learning engine can quickly identify trends in training and rapidly delivers comprehensive and exploitable, context derived insights – enabling commanders to quickly spot and interpret trends from training and deliver far more proactive, real-time and supportive training interventions than are currently possible within traditional collective training progressions.

Benefits

Improved assessment of performance- through KPIs and data visualisation derived from near real-time analysis, benchmarked against NATO performance metrics.

Improved training management- through improved training assurance, training design and training system performance through more effective trend analysis. Efficiencies and savings within the current, and future, training mechanisms.

Broad Utility Across Defence – data exploitation in support of: Lessons process, force development, analysis, experimentation, research and acquisition and support approaches.

Hive transforms the training support process from one of primarily reactive, subjective observation to one of proactive, objective mentorship, and facilitates a true step-change in the effectiveness of the end-to-end military capability process.

Agility

Customers can respond rapidly to changing requirements due to simplicity and speed of data access and the fact that extensive knowledge of the underlying data is not required. If training customers require a different data structure, or have location specific requirements, event-specific implementations are easy and quick to achieve as the system changes required are minimal.

Cost-effectiveness

Hive builds the baseline data set with the data experts and outsource the presentation layer, which makes for highly cost-effective user interfaces and makes changes at the presentation layer much more feasible.

Data quality

Access to training data is controlled through the data services, which tends to improve data quality, as there is a single point for updates. Once those services are tested thoroughly, they need only be regression tested if they remain unchanged for the next deployment. This would maintain confidence in the evidence produced by Hive.

Capability gap

First-class militaries the world over are recognising the need to make better use of the vast amounts of data that underpin all training activity. Yet many of these militaries are struggling to implement, or find tools to support, effective training data exploitation strategies and approaches.

In battle, competitive superiority is derived from an ability to secure and exploit information advantage. Preparing for battle should be no different. Recent military thinking has identified that armies should be making much better use of training information to secure advantage. Many other nations recognise the same issues, understand the importance of better exploiting valuable training data and seek tocapitalise upon it to optimise performance and achieve success on operations.

Yet, despite acknowledging this critical capability gap, many first-class armies are still struggling to put in place effective strategies and approaches to truly harness the power of their training data. For some, this is the result of limited resources. But it is also partly to do with the maturity of associated technologies and, possibly, because of institutional beliefs that existing approaches to both individual and collective training are already sufficient.

This requirement is not unique to the military domain. Within the past 10 years the commercial field of data analytics has emerged as a synthesis of computer science and statistics, both now necessary for dealing with complex, data intensive challenges.

Big Data – the term commonly used to describe this contemporary use of powerful processing techniques and artificial intelligence to derive value from large-scale, diverse datasets – has begun a transformational shift in modern society that has changed how businesses, governments and even sports teams evaluate their performance to secure advantage. Exponential increases in processing power and data availability continue to drive the creation of new analytical methods, tools and techniques that have transformative implications for learning research and practices.

Several first-class armies now recognise the need to make the same step-change. They recognise the potential for data to vastly improve not only training but also force development, experimentation, operational analysis, research and both the acquisition and in-service support of capabilities.

Solution

Hive has been specifically developed to meet these needs and is already in-service and helping armies to optimise their performance based upon its automated, intelligent capture, storage, analysis and presentation of vast training datasets in near real-time.

Hive is an innovative, cost-effective approach to delivering evidence, based upon intelligent, automated training data analysis, that stands up to rigorous scrutiny. It is unparalleled in its adaptive ability to automatically harvest, categorise, store, process and analyse vast amounts of objective and subjective, quantitative and qualitative data from across the live, virtual and constructive training environments and to present it in real-time by means of unique, flexible and innovative visual formats.

Its machine learning engine quickly identifies trends in training and rapidly delivers comprehensive and exploitable, context derived insights – enabling commanders to quickly spot and interpret trends from training and deliver far more proactive, realtime and supportive training interventions than are currently possible within traditional collective training progressions. These insights can be invaluable not just to the training community, but also to wider communities within force development, experimentation, research, operational analysis, acquisition and support activities – allowing data gathered once to be reused many times, by many parts of the organisation for many purposes: harvest once, use repeatedly.

Its machine learning engine can quickly identify trends in training and rapidly delivers comprehensive and exploitable, context derived insights – enabling commanders to quickly spot and interpret trends from training and deliver far more proactive, real-time and supportive training interventions than are currently possible within traditional collective training progressions.

Benefits

Improved assessment of performance- through KPIs and data visualisation derived from near real-time analysis, benchmarked against NATO performance metrics.

Improved training management- through improved training assurance, training design and training system performance through more effective trend analysis. Efficiencies and savings within the current, and future, training mechanisms.

Broad Utility Across Defence – data exploitation in support of: Lessons process, force development, analysis, experimentation, research and acquisition and support approaches.

Hive transforms the training support process from one of primarily reactive, subjective observation to one of proactive, objective mentorship, and facilitates a true step-change in the effectiveness of the end-to-end military capability process.

Agility

Customers can respond rapidly to changing requirements due to simplicity and speed of data access and the fact that extensive knowledge of the underlying data is not required. If training customers require a different data structure, or have location specific requirements, event-specific implementations are easy and quick to achieve as the system changes required are minimal.

Cost-effectiveness

Hive builds the baseline data set with the data experts and outsource the presentation layer, which makes for highly cost-effective user interfaces and makes changes at the presentation layer much more feasible.

Data quality

Access to training data is controlled through the data services, which tends to improve data quality, as there is a single point for updates. Once those services are tested thoroughly, they need only be regression tested if they remain unchanged for the next deployment. This would maintain confidence in the evidence produced by Hive.

This demonstration is to show you how easily it is to interact and find actionable insights and we are using a commercially available data visualisation tool called Microsoft Power BI.

So, to drill into the data, simply choose the one of the many reports by using the arrows at the bottom of the sheet. Once you have selected your report, click on the intuitive dashboards to start interacting with the data.

This demonstration is to show you how easily it is to interact and find actionable insights and we are using a commercially available data visualisation tool called Microsoft Power BI.

So, to drill into the data, simply choose the one of the many reports by using the arrows at the bottom of the sheet. Once you have selected your report, click on the intuitive dashboards to start interacting with the data.