Innovation Meets Mission Podcast

Innovation Meets Mission

Welcome to the Innovation Meets Mission podcast. Whether you’re a visionary starting on an innovation journey or a seasoned innovator, we hope these practical talks inspire you to think about innovation in new ways. In each episode, government leaders and innovators share their stories, insights and experiences with mission-focused innovation. Learn how trailblazers transform ambitious ideas into mission reality.

Tricia Ratliff

Tricia Ratliff, author of "Innovation as a Collaborative Game," is a member of the MindShare hub of tech CEOs. She leads SAIC’s Innovation Dojo, hosts this podcast and has held prior innovation leadership roles. With a computer science degree, she has presented on software solutions, corporate mentoring, agility, and culture change at various events. An agile advocate since 2002, she coaches executives on transformative change and is passionate about innovation for the public good. As an accredited angel investor, she offers practical insights as a pitch panel advisor and mentor at incubators like Startups Ignite.`

Cloud

CJADC2 warfighting requires cloud capabilities to be ubiquitous and globally available, not only at the command level but also across the front lines to provide secure application hosting and data handling. As a cloud engineering leader for DOD and government, SAIC stands ready to support modernizations, migrations and operations in the cloud. With a long history of supporting joint combined mission operations, we are providing expert continuous-integration/continuous-delivery support to power a rapid and agile pipeline of cloud-driven digital capabilities for warfighters. SAIC is the prime industry partner for the Cloud One enterprise cloud for DOD. We have close and influential relationships with all the major cloud service providers and work closely with Cloud One mission-system owners on fielding hybrid and multi-cloud computing environments, DevSecOps chains and optimized managed services.

Edge

CJADC2 warfighters will have enhanced situational awareness, navigation, communications and target acquisition — even in austere environments — as a result of feeding tactical information to command and control and receiving decision information in rapid and continuous data loops. Front-line operators will be equipped with wearable and portable devices that gather, process and send data, video and communications via mobile cloudlets. They will work with physically distanced, cross-domain human and unmanned collaborators in a tactical mesh network. Edge is about giving commanders persistent access to the best kinetic/non-kinetic and lethal/non-lethal fires among ubiquitous options in their command-and-control toolkits. SAIC is working with a host of technologies and developing data architectures to enable cloud-driven edge services and capabilities.

Transport

A range of needs for today and tomorrow’s battlefields makes high-bandwidth, ultra-high-speed, low-latency data transport critical for missions. Command-and-control and situational-awareness applications that feed the common operating picture will be pushing mountains of data. Crystal-clear streaming video requires enormous bandwidth. We will see peer-to-peer transfers of large data files in seconds using cell signals in austere and localized areas of the battlefield. To create seamless connectivity between edge assets, and also between tactical partners, we are working with a diverse range of data transport options, including 5G, LoraWAN, LTE and Bluetooth. We need to utilize all available mobile-broadband means of moving zeros and ones between terminals, mobile satellite antennas and signal equipment.

Data

Persistent access to data under rapid multi-domain, multi-level operating conditions is the key to CJADC2 success. Whether it is for facilitating information flows between DOD partners or between DOD and coalition forces, SAIC’s work transforms data to be platform-agnostic so that it can be distributed and shared more easily. We are supporting the transformation from network-centric to data-centric information systems that results in greater security-implementation flexibilityand machine-to-machine connectivity for data. Our data engineering work also encompasses development of ontology and knowledge models to enable data fusion, development of AI algorithms for data collection and processing, and development of machine learning-assisted data loops between command and the tactical edge.

A podcast for innovators