Listen in as Carolyn and Willie find out the true power of data. Sean Applegate, CTO of SwishData, explains how data can be utilized across an entire mission to empower the warfighter. Episode Table of Contents[01:00] Smart People With Great Ideas [07:29] Your Data Can Work for You up to Some Extent [14:15] Securing the Application So Your Data Can Work for You [22:08] Eight Guiding Principles [28:03] Applicability of AI Episode Links and Resources

Smart People With Great IdeasCarolyn: I'm Carolyn Ford and this week, my guest co-host is Willie Hicks, public sector CTO at Dynatrace. I'm super excited that we get to talk to Sean Applegate, CTO of https://swishdata.com/2021/05/qlik-insights/ (SwishData). Sean: I'm excited to be here, it should be a blast. Carolyn: Honestly, this is the best part of my week. This is the best part of what I do. I love talking to really smart people with great ideas about how technology can better our lives and how the government specifically can do that. So, Sean, you've written a lot of stuff. You're a pretty prolific writer, blogs articles, and a recent blog that I saw, I'm not going to lie, it kind of broke my head. It was a lot of technical stuff, but there were a couple of things in it that were kind of gotchas for me. I'd love for you to drill down into a little bit. At the beginning of your blog, you write, the name of the blog is Optimizing Mission Outcomes with Intelligent Insights. In one of the beginning paragraphs, you say transforming the DoD to a data-centric organization requires that data is visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable, and secure. So I would love for you to dive into that. Sean: I would say the one thing that DoD is noticing, and you'll see this with some of their DevSecOps reference architectures is it requires culture change. Whether that's the business leaders or the mission leaders, the contractors, the developers, the people running infrastructure, or delivering a service. Your Data Can Work For You But It Has To Be AccessibleSean: They've identified that the data has to be accessible across all of those different parts of the mission. That getting that data collectively together is extremely important. It's valuable for both mission velocity and a competitive advantage around the world, whether that's DoD or civilian agencies, we see that as well. So data is critical, be able to find it first.Carolyn: If you've got the data, what do you mean it's not accessible? Do you mean like across agencies or across groups? Sean: A lot of it is making it not just within your command, but outside the command. So it's trusted. For example, I'm using an application performance management issue. I'm delivering an application, I have lots of stuff on the application. I may not have a lot of stuff on the user community, or maybe somebody wants to analyze the success of my mission. That mission can be measured, lots of different ways. How do I merge those data points together? So I can draw, make a business decision from that, that's very impactful. That may be something at a very strategic echelon such as the Pentagon. Or maybe very tactical, down at the tip of the sphere, the unit deployed overseas. I need to make a decision right this minute. How do we do that? That's very complex. Carolyn: One of the things that gets bounced around a lot these days, you guys have both talked about AIOps. Using AIOps to get us to this place, all of these things that you list. Can you talk about how AI ops enables this? Your Data Can Work for You Through Problem Solving Complex ThingsSean: On the AIOps side, what we find is, it allows our human workers to better focus on problem-solving and the complex things you can easily do with the computer. The AI piece allows us to typically make linkage. If you think of linked data, it's the dependencies between data points or systems. In many cases, when we look at application performance management, a