What started as a First Army initiative to track information about their partners in the National Guard and Reserve has become an instrumental part of the Army’s situational awareness. First Army works year-round with its Reserve Component partners, meaning it needs to stay informed about those unit’s metrics. While the Army has long had record-keeping systems, the lack of one consolidated source proved problematic.
Maj. Kyle Krebs, First Army chief of data science, said that First Army Commanding General, Lt. Gen. Mark Landes “recognized the need for better access to unit level readiness.”
With that, Blue Pane was born. Blue Pane refers to a Vantage application developed by the First Army Operational Data Team. The program provides real-time situational awareness of information in common readiness categories that enable rapid decision making.
“When the Army licensed Vantage in 2019, one of the Lines of Effort created several readiness products for leaders to observe unit readiness, statistics, and metrics,” Krebs said. “The challenge with those data products is that they’re hard to access and hard to find. One of the things that Blue Pane does is make unit readiness information more accessible. There is an ease of navigation now with units at echelon. Instead of having to remember names of units or UICs, we can easily navigate it.”
Eliminating the wait time has significant advantages, according to Lt. Col. Melissa Sayers, chief of First Army Operations Research and Systems Analysis.
“We have a lot of Common Operating Pictures out there that look at the same information,” she said. “We have equipment that we want to see, we want to see the maintenance status, we want to see the status of people, when they’re due for things, what courses they’ve been to. In the past, you might have looked at an OER and ORB or NCOER and ERB or IPPS-A. But a lot of times, as a commander or a leader, you have to go to your staff and say, ‘Pull this for me,’ or you wait for the PowerPoint brief once a week or once a month that tells you the status of your maintenance and your equipment. To get a feeling for what’s happening on a daily basis and correct issues at the speed of need, we need to have something that updates on a more regular basis.”
Blue Pane solves that issue and it has several other beneficial applications.
“It’s the same thing with financial,” Sayers said. “You had to wait for these PowerPoint briefs that come out from your staff sections, and so how do you get a more real-time update of where you’re at so you can make better decisions? Well, we have Vantage now that lets us create data pipelines, where you have the data from all these sources where people used to log in manually and pull up the information and make a PowerPoint brief and send it via e-mail to their commander or brief it or put it on the shared drive. Now, instead, those data sources automatically populate.”
It is all on the one place, hence the name Single Pane of Glass – Blue, with blue referring to friendly forces. It is used to assist with issues related to finance, readiness, medical, legal, equipment, and much more. This allows First Army units to get a snapshot of partnered units, work through obstacles, and plan how best to empower those units.
And anyone in the Army can contribute, Sayers noted.
“I would love to see an Army of data professionals making these products for the Army,” she said. “We are smarter together and the ability to collaborate on a common data pipeline inside Vantage has the ability to make us incredibly powerful.”
It also serves to strengthen the partnership between First Army and the Reserve Component.
“It knocked down barriers when it came to access to needed readiness information,” Krebs said. “Anytime we need to get a snapshot of unit readiness, it’s very easy for our OC/Ts to observe partnered unit readiness metrics to frame their readiness posture. Within Vantage, there are a series of Army sources records that feed readiness information…that connect all that data and make it easier for First Army to get a better holistic picture of the units.”
Moreover, it has proven to be user-friendly.
“We’ve got a very simple graphic user interface that allows the user to easily find the unit that they’re looking for and within the click of a couple of buttons, they’re observing all the training metrics that they’re looking for,” Krebs said.
He also lauded the product for its scale and scope: “Scale, in that everyone can use it and access it at the same time. All of the features that we’ve built in Blue Pane allow it so seamlessly flow between the components, up and down echelon. You can see across all the Army’s information sources the readiness information that we’re capturing.
“Then there’s scope, which is specific to your organization. Every UIC across the Army can customize the MOSs and the equipment that they want to see on their UIC’s Blue Pane. And when they customize their view, it doesn’t change the view of their superior or their subordinate. Every organization across the Army can tailor their view of Blue Pane to what matters to them. You’re seeing what matters to you.”
It all adds up to more information, faster decisions, and a more lethal Army.
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