The new NATO Strategic Concept, approved at the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, affirms that the Alliance must expedite Digital Transformation as it continues to enhance its collective readiness and interoperability. In short, the rapidly changing security environment requires the Alliance to re-think data-sharing, synchronization, trust, and security.
The fall 2022 Think-Tank for Information Decision and Execution Superiority (TIDE) Sprint scheduled for Oct. 24-28, 2022, in Virginia Beach, Virginia will bring together participants from NATO, government, industry, and academia to explore ideas, concepts, and requirements necessary for Digital Transformation.
At the heart of NATO’s Digital Transformation is data centricity, the prominent role of data to support interoperability, national command and control capabilities and information technology. TIDE Sprint will explore novel ways to better share, harness, and exploit data to meet operator’s needs and future-proof the Alliance.
This unique biannual think-tank event, through multiple subject tracks, will also explore many of NATO’s most timely strategic challenges, such as the advancement of the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept and Warfare Development Agenda and provides a forum for alignment around Warfare Development Imperatives such as Cognitive Superiority, Integrated Multi-Domain Defence, and Layered Resilience.
The Interoperability Verification and Validation Track will focus on using data-driven evaluation to measure Nations’ command and control interoperability against recognized standards and documents, informing stronger testing activities.
The Medical Track is also embracing Digital Transformation by highlighting innovative telehealth products on behalf of the Health and Information Systems Technology Working Group which focuses primarily on experimentation, cybersecurity and increasing interoperability between Nations in the field of military health information systems, technology, and information exchange. NATO’s evolution toward telehealth, updates from the Military Medicine Centre of Excellence Force Health Protection on the Near Real Time Surveillance IT tool and cyber topics related to NATO military medicine Digital Transformation will be explored.
Finally, the Data Centric Security and Data Science and Artificial Intelligence tracks will explore National initiatives and NATO’s approach to data security along with the Alliance’s evolution into a digitalized, data-enabled organization – all essential components of Digital Transformation.
“As NATO accelerates its Digital Transformation, TIDE Sprint enables our community to come together and align NATO’s people and processes for the digital age,” said Jean-Rene Couture, Branch Head, Federated Interoperability at Allied Command Transformation. “The capabilities, standards, and solutions discussed at TIDE Sprint will ultimately ensure that those who deploy in the future to protect the Alliance can do so with stronger data and greater confidence.”
Through TIDE Sprint and events like it, Allied Command Transformation continues to provide innovative contributions to NATO’s objectives of Digital Transformation and future-proofing the Alliance.