Realizing the potential of digital transformation in today’s US Air Force is complicated and difficult.  Weapon systems in the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle often have incomplete data in outdated formats, stored in discontinuous fashion across the enterprise.  Programs in various stages of acquisition are confronted with expensive choices to properly define data requirements, with the potential impacts to be felt for many decades thereafter.  The enterprise struggles to attain efficiency in IT environments because of the wide variation in the data environment; however, ‘top-down’ enterprise IT solutions are still prescribed on somewhat dubious assumptions of homogeneous requirements and traditional deployment mentality.    

This presentation will summarize a novel approach to making impacts at the user level in this somewhat hostile environment.  The AFRL Digital Greenhouse project employs an agile methodology coupled with a ‘sandbox’ data environment to facilitate digital improvement for a variety of user stories.  The sandbox environment is enabled by partnership with well-established software vendors (e.g. Aras) and user stories are captured and curated to facilitate learning across the AF enterprise.  Example engagements with several AF programs will be highlighted.