The U.S. Air Force is working on a draft strategy to guide the military branch’s investments in robotic process automation (RPA) and other areas and Lauren Knausenberger, the service’s chief information officer and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said a large portion of that strategy seeks to automate data sharing, Federal News Network reported Monday.
“When we’re talking about moving data, or talking about visualizing data, we want to do more and more with feeds that are automatically sending data to where it needs to go, rather than having operators have to get into loops,” Knausenberger said. “So we still do have a problem with that in certain places, or you know we’re passing data via chat in certain places.”
In 2020, the Air Force inquired about tasks warfighters want to be automated through the Vice Chief’s Challenge and selected 15 proposals as part of the program, including a chat bot that could respond to financial queries at Air Education Training Command.
Knausenberger said those initiatives are now in various implementation phases and that she wants to see the service make RPA applications widely available as part of its cloud platform.
“What I’d like to get us to is for robotic process automation is, here are the products that are accredited for our networks. Let’s have them available and easily consumable in cloud one,” she said. “And let’s have industry be thinking as part of their solutions, ‘How do I use those enterprise services to help you?’”
