Vanguard Magazine

INTERVIEW www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024 19 Bold Quest, Mission Partner Environment Interoperability Initiative (MII), and the Global Information Dominance experi- ment (GIDE). This is being viewed by our Five Eyes partners as a critical gateway to achieving secret cloud interoperability. If you ask me what a win looks like over the next 12 months, it is a limited instance of connec- tivity in a Five Eyes secret cloud. That's probably number one, because if we don't achieve that, the technological interoper- ability gap could become very difficult to overcome. Looking out 36 months, it would be to build on this. Working with my colleagues in CIO and DTO as well as the Force Gen- erators and Force Employers, the aim will be to quickly scale this in a manner that is most relevant to operational imperatives while concurrently working together to tackle broader digitalization and opera- tional sustainment modernization efforts. Michael Rouleau: Q I'd like to switch to the question of readiness. Military commanders are responsible for generating readiness outcomes on behalf of the Chief of the Defence Staff, and yet so much of what drives readiness really lives in the institutional space. It's engineering data. It's infrastructure data. It's financial data and all the rest of it. How does readiness inform your work? Ross Ermel: Readiness, to your question, is at the core of my considerations as to how we need to move digital transforma- tion, how we think about data at the en- terprise-to-edge level, how we think about tools such as AI, and how we bring this together. The Government of Canada's largest enterprise resource planning initiative, DEFENCE x , will give us the ability for the first time to really take a user-first, busi- ness transformation approach to reduce customization, to adopt best practices that key allies use, to give us a single source of truth, and to be the core of our defence business and operational readiness. At the departmental level, where the majority of institutional enablers reside, those enablers are all necessary to generate military readiness, and that's at the core of what this department does. Raj Thuppal: I can talk about two differ- ent viewpoints. One is, as the CIO, I need certain readiness within the infrastructure and the application space, understanding what issues we are facing from an IT, ICT landscape. So, understanding the metrics, understanding the data, understanding where we are spending money, where the outages are, to be prepared in case of failures and stuff like that. We are far from there. We don't have an integrated view of different systems, different cyber capabilities and how we can look at the enterprise, the whole infrastructure and application space as a capability. The other piece is to what Ross was say- ing, how do we make sure that we design the platforms to be able to provide that readiness information to decision mak- ers? Right now, we spend years collecting that data to be able to provide some intel- ligence for certain functions. How do we prevent that from happening in the future? How do we build the platforms and sys- tems with data readiness as a primary ob- Members of the Spanish and Canadian Armed Forces as part of NATO enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group Latvia work together towards the integration of the Integrated Soldier System Generation 2 communications equipment during Operation REASSURANCE in Latvia on 25 August, 2023. Canadian Armed Forces Photo

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