The Netherlands

The Netherlands Defense Force ADL Partnership Center was established in 2018, initiated by the Operational Readiness Department in The Hague in close collaboration with the Joint IT Command in Utrecht. Both organizations strive to effectively give command to organize operational readiness and IT support respectively.

Since there is a substantial IT component within every work field, the IT Department is currently working towards integrating standardized IT functionality in the field of Education & Training (E&T) including Simulation/Simulators and distributed learning. In order to effectively and efficiently support operational readiness, the Netherlands Defense Force ADL Partnership Center is propagating open standards (like xAPI and TLA) as means to register all student data in a standardized and structured way. Thus, the goal will be to capture where and when a student was, what his/her progress is, and in the end, what qualifications are to be registered in the centralized personnel database.

Mission

The mission of the Netherlands Defense Force ADL Partnership Center is to support Operational Readiness to gather and always maintain insight on personnel readiness. In order to achieve that, their goal is to implement the TLA. Thus, the center supports all personnel in continuously learning and growing in an easy way (any place, any time, any device), in both formal and informal situations, and in a personally tailored way.

Together with the ADL Initiative and the members within the ADL Global Partnership Network, the Netherlands Defense Force ADL Partnership Center would like to share their research data and pick up relevant thoughts, ideas, and practices in order to further implement xAPI and TLA initiatives in the Dutch Defense E&T (including Simulation and distributed learning) architecture.

Leadership

Photo of Armand Vincentie — Armand Vincentie

Armand Vincentie started his career in the late 80’s at the Dutch Department of Defense (DDoD) after he graduated as a school teacher. Since there were very few jobs for teachers at that time and the DDoD needed IT specialists, Armand started his internship at DDoD, combining IT studies and past work as a software developer, project manager, and consultant. As a teacher by trade, he stayed in the Education & Training area and did a variety of E&T jobs for the Navy, Land, Air, and Military Police as well as other Dutch Departments such as Internal Affairs and Education. During the late 90’s he earned his degree in Management, Information and Technology. Next, he started several mentoring and coaching tracks on his own, culminating in having mentoring and coaching as an embedded HR instrument in DDoD management. Armand is currently working on management reports for operational readiness: How should they look like and what data should they present?

Frank Gaiser started his career as a soldier in the armed forces at the Dutch Department of Defense (DDoD) in 1981 after graduating school as a car mechanic. After fulfilling his duty as a soldier Frank stayed at the DDoD as a civilian in the training and education field. When the first personal computers entered the department of defense, Frank went back to school to become an IT professional in the field of business administration. Working as an IT professional at the training and education command of the armed forces he, with a team of specialists, automated the supply and demand chain for education and training within the armed forces. In 2006 a DDoD-wide project named STEP (Standardizing Training & Education Process) was started, and Frank participated as a project leader for the armed forces. After the implementation of STEP was completed in 2008, he joined the Joint IT Command. Frank is currently participating in a Research Task Group for “Optimization of Investment in Simulation-Based Military Training” conducted under the NATO Science and Technology Organization.

Both Armand and Frank worked-on behalf of the Director of Operational Readiness-since 2008 together with a small team of professionals to take some serious action in standardizing IT for the DDoD schools. The results of five years of work have produced one chain of new IT tools to support all school business functions in a standardized way, thus securing registration of personnel operational readiness data in one centralized database. It is still evolving and growing and harnessing the essential and necessary base of operational readiness. They are now in close contact with the experts in the technical and simulation industry. These costly machines are a means to learn and gain experience and therefore should be connected within the new E&T architecture. Their job in this field is to extract student data for all those different environments (eco-systems, etc.) in a standardized way using xAPI and growing towards the TLA. In a separate track, on behalf of the Director of Operational Readiness, they are working on a completely new way of seeing the primary process of DDoD: instead of seeing readiness as a pre-requisite for combat, these processes are more intertwined, and IT should support both for a smooth transition.