S2. E3: Building a Data Ecosystem: A Very Military Problem

Warfighter Podcast

While Tom has been battling an annual occurrence of “Flymageddon” on his farm, the team have been busily lining up exciting guests for Season 2. We plan to pick up on many of the themes from Season 1 and start pulling those threads!

This episode is no different, and we are pleased to be joined by Winston Chang from Snowflake who is their CTO for Global Public Sector and so has a special interest in dealing with large data problems across government and defence. Winston is himself a West Point graduate, so brings a perspective from both civil and military angles.

We start by asking Winston how we got here, providing a potted history of the movement from Data Warehouses to deal with ‘Big Data’, Data Lakes and Platforms. Of particular note is the move from fixed infrastructure to cloud deployment of data, which fosters improved collaboration and data sharing.

Of course no episode is complete without mention of AI, and Winston goes on to explain how these developments have helped to enable deployment of machine learning and LLMs, which require large amounts of storage and compute resource. Without which the current crop of generative AI applications would not be possible.

While covering many topics in a short session, Winston makes an interesting point about how we should view data like a water ecosystem. We need to learn how to cultivate and curate this resource, and it doesn’t need to always be in a perfect state to gain benefits from it. Like a natural ecosystem, it supports a wide range of sources, users and consumers.

Last but not least, we speak of the challenge to build a common understanding of how we should manage data, as well as build a workforce with the necessary skills and experience to properly exploit it.

Hosts:

• Tom Constable: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-constable/
• Colin Hillier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinhillier/

Guests:

• Winston Chang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/winstonwchang/

Links:

• Website: https://www.warfighterpodcast.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/warfighter-digital/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkgiH-cwmyc2I2Iyc8MLYtg
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WarfighterPod

Episode Sponsor: Babcock International

Babcock has always operated hand in hand with our customers because their mission is our mission. Our people support the British Army by contributing to front-line support, delivering the capability they need, available to them wherever, whenever and however they need it. We ensure the British Army can focus on their missions safely by supporting their vehicles, both armoured and white fleet with skilled engineers and capability backed by long-term through-life engineering expertise.

We enable our defence and emergency services customers to do their job with our technical training programmes. We combine deep understanding and long-term commitment with constructive challenge. An embedded partner, focussed on outcomes. Globally, new defence and resilience equipment programmes and asset modernisation programmes are seeing a resurgence. Training personnel is a critical component to support these programmes.

Whether it’s applying engineering excellence or the latest technology, we combine our expertise with a practical mindset. Alongside our deep engineering experience, digital and data technologies will allow us to better understand, predict and enhance the performance of the assets we manage, make better engineering decisions to reduce risk and improve service delivery.