Instead of juggling reports from around the Navy to stay up-to-date on the fleet, these days the chief of naval operations can pull up a monitoring tool on her computer to find exactly what she’s looking for.
Now part of her weekly routine, the CNO Executive Metrics Dashboard is built to pull in data on Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s priority areas in a few clicks.
“We all get to see our bank accounts live, why shouldn’t the CNO be able to see the readiness of our ships live?” Jim Raimondo, Franchetti’s special assistant, said in a December release.
Raimondo came up with the idea and Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic executed it last year, feeding data uploaded from around the fleet into a landing page with clickable graphics for topics like maintenance or manning, then a search function to look for specific commands.
“Previously, the CNO was receiving multiple reports from multiple Navy organizations” including Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and PowerPoint slides, Claire Ameen, a data scientist for NIWC Atlantic, said in the release. “We are helping to automate that process and trying to decide on one authoritative data source so that the CNO has current figures at all times.”
Franchetti’s data analytics staff check the dashboard daily and add updates to CNO briefings, Cmdr. Desiree Frame, Franchetti’s spokeswoman, told Defense One.
Frame said her boss looks at the dashboard on a weekly basis, using it to take notes and bring up-to-date information to meetings with Pentagon, congressional and White House officials.
“The dashboard currently has nearly a dozen metrics that are automatically updated,” she said. “There is still work in progress to automate other data, removing the need for manual updates.”
The Navy is building multiple dashboards as part of its contribution to the Pentagon’s connect-everything JADC2 effort. But a dashboard, no matter how slick, is only as good as its data, warned Jamie Foggo, the retired admiral who is now dean of the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy.
For some metrics, there’s a distinctly unobjective human creating the inputs. The Defense Readiness Reporting System, for example, has a stoplight-style rating that commanders fill in based on their readiness to deploy: green for ready to go, yellow for some issues but not totally out, and red for absolutely not.
But what if you’re leaning more toward orange?
“What’s the difference between yellow and orange? It’s closer to red. So if I’m orange, do I say I’m yellow? Because it’s not as bad?” Foggo said. “So there has to be, you know, honesty and forthrightness in the reporting of the criteria – you don’t want to give the CNO information that’s incorrect.”
NIWC considered that in the dashboard’s creation. It uses the Department of the Navy’s Jupiter data management system, which pulls in data from across the Navy and displays it as raw data (bronze), organized data (silver) and verified and ready-for-use data (gold). The gold stuff goes into CNO’s dashboard.
Even if it’s not perfect, Foggo said, the new dashboard is a bit of a dream realized. He recalled a 1997 discussion with a Pentagon official about building a tool that could pull in data from DRRS.
The idea, he said, was that “I can sit at my desk and I can have, like, a baseball card pop up for an individual unit, a frigate, a destroyer, a submarine, an aircraft carrier, a strike group, you know.”
It never happened back then, Foggo said, but it makes even more sense now.
“I mean, look at the New York Stock Exchange. Everybody can tell exactly you know what’s happening to their particular equity market stocks on a second-by-second basis,” he said. “So why shouldn’t we be able to determine the readiness of the fleet on immediate notice?”
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