Considering Training as a Service within the Acquisition Strategy
(Room S320F)
28 Nov 17
2:30 PM
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3:00 PM
Recently, the US Army Human Dimension Concept (2014) and US Army Warfighting Challenges (2017) have called for a more flexible, adaptive, and effective training strategy and technologies that accelerate acquiring collective team skills to keep pace with rapidly changing, and complex warfare requirements. Currently, reviews of the Army’s nonsystem training devices indicate large footprint training simulators target just a small portion of collective skills, have high sustainment costs and low usage rates, and training effectiveness is difficult to track (United States General Accounting Office, 2016). To address these issues the Army has proposed the single Synthetic Training Environment with the vision of providing greater training flexibility at reduced cost through low footprint, mobile, reconfigurable, immersive simulators that provide the right level of cognitive fidelity tailored to learning requirements specified by end-users at the Point of Need (PoN). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the requirements for an effective PoN capability. We describe how the Training as a Service (TaaS) paradigm could support the PoN and argue for an innovative concept of TaaS within the acquisition strategy. For example, providing evidence of training effectiveness could be built into the requirements for delivering a service, and could be employed as procurement selection criteria. To illustrate, we describe a use case example and a concept for a Collective Training Management Architecture (CTMA) that we propose will be necessary to implement TaaS to achieve a PoN solution.