Innovation is key in the Air Force. As leaders in this area, airmen take a lot of pride in concocting new technology, process, and procedures to meet the growing need of their Warfighters. But what happens when a funded, ongoing innovation platform loses sight of its users' needs and expands way out of scope? Queue an AF CyberWorx team led by yours truly to deep-dive research the platform and what it is truly delivering vs what it has promised to do in the form of a light business case analysis.
How might we inform AETC decision makers of the current state and future viability of the MOTAR platform's capabilities, value to end users, network architecture scalability, and cost justification?
As a 3rd party to this effort, our Team was uniquely positioned to provide non-partial, data-driven course of action recommendations for the Major Command (MAJCOM) Air Education Training Command (AETC). So, we set to work examining all aspects of the Member Operations Training Analytics and Reporting (MOTAR) platform and its place within the AETC ecosystem of innovation.
MOTAR was originally conceieved as a reimagined delivery platform for air craft maintainer AR/VR training content. What it tried to become after over 5 years of development is the entire content delivery backbone for the Air Force, while casting off their original, user-focused goals almost entirely.
Our team found significant barriers and risk in continued MOTAR funding from AETC directly. We found that the project morphed through over 5 years of development on the government's dime to not only miss the mark in terms of original innovation purpose, but also was gross wasted of Air Force innovation fundings. Our team recommended that AETC allow MOTAR to develop separately in situations where it actualy meets a user need, with the potential to revisit the system in the future should it meet a command-approved requirement. In the meantime, we recommended turning future funding and efforts toward internal development for innovation pipeline governance to prevent this perfect storm of over-reliance on civilian contractors, rapidly changing requirements, lack of data collection or testing efforts, and little (if any) focus on true user needs.
From February through March 2023, our Team conducted 20 qualitative interviews around MOTAR's history, stakeholders, connection to warfighter needs, user groups, experimentation backing, and capabilities—ultimately gathering and synthesizing data from 48 personnel across 2 MAJCOMs, 14 Offices, 1 Vendor, and 1 user group.
From this research, Air Force CyberWorx gathered more than 1,300 data points and grouped these insights by emergent qualities, translating to 7 distinct insight areas around MOTAR.
Our AF CyberWorx team also examined and analyzed 113 supporting documents for the MOTAR ecosystem, including current and past contracts, financial records, and many others. Additionally, our Team utilized Human-Centered Design; Contracting Officer Representative experience; and SBIR lifecycle, contract review, and analysis to orient ourselves around the interviews, ecosystem, and documentation that fed into this effort. This exercise leveraged experiential sense-making to uncover emergent outcomes of the problem space.
Our Team completed all interviews and delivered an extensive report alongside an outbrief to stakeholders all in under 2 months. Based on our research, the major command was able to identify MOTAR as a waste of funding and instead shifted their focus to better fostering a positive innovation pipeline to keep wasteful spending from occuring in the future.
Between saving a significant sum for the Air Force, helping the stakeholders feel heard, and keeping innovation accountable for its end users, our Team helped deliver value to the Air Education Training Command and the Air Force itself.
Air Force Development Team (DT) boards are responsible for selecting the upper echelon of Air Force officers. Through a research effort combined with system design based off user design criteria, my Team and I improved both the efficiency and efficacy of the DT board process.
Innovation is the conduit for so many meaningful ideas, but it is also important to identify programs that fall short of their proposed intent. Enter MOTAR, a research-heavy initiative culminating in a business case analysis lite to inform decision-makers of the Air Education and Training Command.
Maryland State Library knew their user experience, particularly surrounding navigation, was flawed and wanted data to back it up. Our Team siezed the opportunity to create an updated navigation structure to go along with a modernized UI.
Copyright by John Roberts