Decision-support analytics for Navy acquisition leadership

The terrain

The Navy has been transforming their acquisition practice by realigning to Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAE)s. As they organizationally transform, there are many questions they ask that are hard, highly visible, and time-sensitive, yet the data needed to answer them had never been brought together in a form leadership could see directly. Every answer depended on someone assembling it by hand or disparate analytic systems across various platforms.

The route

DataTrek works side by side with those senior leaders to understand not only what the data landscape was but the processes that created the data. The first task was to curate authoritative data sets, settling which sources count and what each field means. On that foundation we built ontologies that are now used across the entire Department of the Navy, giving every program, office, and tool a shared vocabulary for the acquisition portfolio.

With the data and ontologies in place, we delivered the decision-support tools leadership actually uses, and established a digital-first transformation framework for the acquisition community so the approach outlives any single dashboard. Finally, we put the ontologies to work as the grounding for AI agents that can answer the Navy’s toughest acquisition questions on demand.

The summit

For the first time, Navy acquisition leadership has broad, direct visibility into the portfolio instead of waiting on a manually assembled report. The ontologies have become shared infrastructure across the Department, and the AI agents built on them turn a question that once took days of staff work into an answer available on demand. The framework we put in place keeps extending to new data sets and new questions. DataTrek took part in shifting the culture of powerpoint briefs to live decision discussions backed by data.