Out of ‘prototype mode’: Officials aim to determine Advana’s next moves by mid-June

Abstract image of circuit board and CPU generated ai brain. (Getty

WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials see a “huge opportunity” in turning the department’s prototype data analytics platform Advana into an official program of record, but there are still significant questions to be answered about how, exactly, to go about it, two senior officials involved in the program told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview.

“We’ve got to take them out of a prototype mode,” Margaret Palmieri, the acting head of CDAO, told Breaking Defense. “We need to improve its program management [because] it’s grown quite large. … It’s a huge opportunity… for the Department to get more efficiency out of its enterprise platform, but also more effectiveness.”

One of the biggest questions they have to answer, and soon, is who will oversee the new program management office they’re creating. Will the acquisition team for Advana report to the Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO), which currently runs Advana? Will the program be run by one of the armed services on behalf of the whole Department of Defense? Or will it fall under some other Defense Department agency? 

“It could be any of these organizations,” said Dave Tremper, who runs the Acquisition Integration & Interoperability Office in the undersecretariat for Acquisition & Sustainment (A&S). “We’re just getting in all the data,” he told Breaking Defense, adding that the department has 30 to 60 days, or until the middle of June, to make these decisions.

The bureaucratic details matter because the Pentagon wants to put Advana on a firmer, permanent footing without sacrificing the organizational agility or technical adaptability that made the system so popular in the first place.

Palmieri said that Advana is currently at about 100,000 users — triple what it was when CDAO was stood up in 2022.

Advana, short for “Advancing Analytics,” was developed in 2017 as a bespoke bookkeeping tool to help the Pentagon in its long, and still as yet unsuccessful, bid to finally pass an audit. But officials said its growing capacity to pull together information from previously incompatible databases — and let users customize their tools to query, display, and analyze that data — proved attractive to audiences across the Defense Department, from top policymakers in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to operational planners at the four-star Combatant Commands.

Growing pains were inevitable. CDAO was already concerned about Advana outgrowing its organizational supports last summer, when it announced a plan to restructure the contract (held since 2019 by Booz Allen Hamilton) and hold new competitions to open it to more vendors, especially innovative small businesses. Then, last month, Breaking Defense was the first to report on a DoD memo directing Advana to advance to a program of record.

The 10-year, $15 billion “re-compete” plan is still on track, and the reorganization into a formal program of record should not slow it down, Palmieri said, although the timeline is still to be determined. She added that the re-compete and the reorganization do affect each other. The final form of the re-compete will be shaped by the current organizational review, and the move to a new contracting structure for Advana is one reason to change the organization running it.

“The re-compete … is probably the knee in the curve here,” Palmieri said. “That all kind of came to a crescendo at the beginning of this year.”

The rising costs of the growing platform, and the new perspective brought by a new administration, also drove the desire to put Advana on a firmer bureaucratic basis, Tremper added.

“There’s a lot of users to Advana. There’s a lot of money going into Advana,” he said. “The new administration recognizes we need to be accounting for all these things and we need to be rigorous about it.”

Making Advana a formal program of record has several big advantages, Tremper told Breaking Defense. 

Fiscally, it gives Advana its own line item in the Defense Department budget, improving transparency, predictability and financial planning.

Organizationally, creating a program office sets up a team of acquisition professionals dedicated to all aspects of Advana. That goes beyond the fast-paced software development and deployment that CDAO is already doing, adding unglamorous necessities such as long-term sustainment, product support, and even, one day, decommissioning — what the DoD calls life-cycle management.

Legally, a formal program management office can use Acquisition & Sustainment authorities not available to the current CDAO team. That’s particularly useful for Advana because it impacts and interacts with all the different armed services and multiple defense agencies, Tremper said. While CDAO can issue policy guidance, A&S can issue a formal Acquisition Decision Memorandum that requires organizations across the Defense Department to work with a Program Of Record.

None of this cuts CDAO out of the picture, both officials emphasized.

“We don’t say, ‘okay, we’re done… CDAO, go do something else,’” Tremper said. “There will be a relationship in there, too, that we have to evolve.”

Even if the program office ends up somewhere else, CDAO will retain key policy and technical expertise, and it might end up generating the formal requirements for what the program office acquires. (This division between generating requirements and acquisition is commonplace in the Defense Department.)

“We can focus on the requirements and technical prioritization,” Palmieri said.

Tremper and Palmieri also said the new structure must retain the rapid development that CDAO has brought to Advana.

Skeptics might look at Pentagon program offices as slow-moving, industrial-age bureaucracies and groan “oh my God, this is gonna take forever,” Tremper acknowledged. But with the spread of streamlined alternative processes like the newly minted Software Acquisition Pathway, which is explicitly modeled on private-sector best practices, “we are in a different world of acquisition,” he argued. 

“You are not going to have milestone decisions and a massive bureaucracy, because we are not delivering the F-35. … We are delivering software that has a lot of users, a lot of investment, and we need to do it in an agile way,” Temper said.