Bridge CONOPS Project Tackles Life-Cycle Management for Distributed Learning Content
For three years, Wayne Gafford of ADL’s Life Cycle and Configuration team led a multi-national effort to create a solution for bridging the information divide between technical manuals and distributed learning and other forms of technical training content. The result, he says, is a new Concept of Operations (CONOPS) business model for the acquisition, development and life-cycle management of integrated data used in technical publications and interactive multimedia instruction products.
The “Bridge CONOPS” endeavor was initially launched through an international pre-planning project from September – December 2008 in response to a need “to integrate the development and management of technical information for producing technical manuals and training courses,” said Gafford. “Too often,” he explained, “training personnel are notified of changes after the manuals are fielded, which means instructors have to sift through new technical manuals to figure out what revisions need to be made to the digital learning content.”
The pre-planning for this project was sponsored by the DoD’s Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, the Norwegian Defense Logistics Organization, Sweden’s Saab Aerotech, and the Swedish Defense Material Administration.
The sponsors formed the International S1000D – SCORM® (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) Bridge Project Team to define requirements for a specification that integrates authoring environments for SCORM-based learning content with S100D Common Source Databases (CSDBs) used for technical manuals. The international team was composed of data standards developers, instructional designers, human performance technologists, computer scientists, SCORM programmers, technical manual authors, and government and industry executives.
Gafford led the project, pulling together the sponsors and the international team, which met several times in 2008 to define problem statements, use cases, and functional requirements that would drive the specification development. It was during this time that the team specified the need to factor integrated logistics support (ILS) into the life-cycle management of distributed learning content to guarantee fully sustainable data readiness.
This conclusion was later amplified in a cost-analysis study performed by the Institute for Defense Analyses, which stated: “Technical learning content not factored into life cycle logistics leads to misalignments between training and authoritative source material. These misalignments also lead to wasteful spending.”
Gafford noted, “Training units have never really thought of themselves in the logistics space, but training is clearly considered part of product support according to DoD Instruction 5000.02, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, and according to the Defense Acquisition Guidebook.”
Outputs from the pre-planning activities were then fed into a main Bridge Project, which launched in February 2009. Funding was provided by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OUSD) for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) as part of the Reduction in Total Ownership Cost (RTOC) program. The initial beneficiary of the effort is the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Mission Modules Program (PMS 420), which integrates the mission modules into the LCS.
The Bridge Project team first developed an application programming interface (API) bridge, which enables developers to access CSDBs for training content. “The idea,” said Schawn Thropp, lead API developer and prime contractor lead, “was to develop and store technical learning content in the same CSDB containing technical manuals.”
As the project matured, however, the team determined that additional innovation was required to foster interoperability throughout system life cycles. The outcome was a comprehensive CONOPS framework of software tools and technical and business processes that can help training facilities develop and manage technical documentation and training data in a CSDB.
Completed in September 2011, the new framework is described in the final CONOPS guide as a suite of capabilities that will improve distributed learning content readiness “during life-cycle logistics which support products and systems that require continuous modifications and changes.”
According to Jeff Clem, the CONOPS development lead from Lockheed Martin, the new business model offers a completed prototype that can now be tested for real-use implementation. “It describes business rules, use cases and process requirements, and offers the tools to support them,” he said.
For the next step, Gafford commented, “The project must now transition from development to implementation through stakeholders.” Stakeholders can access the Bridge CONOPS and the suite of capabilities at:
http://www.adlnet.gov/bridge-project.
