The Royal Navy strove to centralise data essential to supporting and maintaining its Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and warships. In doing so, it wanted to enhance operational support for personnel at sea, giving the right people timely access to exactly the right information – in turn helping them maximise the availability of critical Defence assets.
But bringing together two decades worth of disparate, legacy databases was not a simple task. It required a new data management solution, which is why the Royal Navy engaged BAE Systems Digital Intelligence to help. Alongside a number of industry partners, we are delivering a programme to effectively centralise data, ready to be found and shared by naval decision-makers.
The Challenge
The Royal Navy’s data estate had become fragmented, operating multiple databases across its Queen Elizabeth and warship platforms. This was causing challenges when it came to sharing information between different parts of the Navy’s ecosystem. A Data Integration Platform for its Queen Elizabeth platform did exist. While this was delivering benefits, the ultimate aim was to replace it with a scalable, common Navy-controlled and hosted system, capable of unifying its data estate across its aircraft carrier and warship platforms.
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The Solution
To help the Royal Navy securely consolidate data, we provided an Integrated Intelligent Complex Asset Management toolset. The technology enables the Navy to optimise the performance of the ships via proactive maintenance. It also allows documentation to be delivered to Navy maintainers in a timely way, giving them the ability to make quicker, informed decisions about the day-to-day running of a ship.
Starting with the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, we created a scalable UK MOD-owned solution. This involved securely and compliantly transferring data held in the Data Integration Platform over to the new platform, with a view of rolling it out across the other warship platforms.
The Results
The Royal Navy now has its first ever government-owned data platform for the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier. Across one week, we have securely and successfully transferred over 1.1 million documents across multiple systems to the new environment, while simultaneously creating a roadmap for connecting the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and warship data platforms in the near future.
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