While people from Silicon Valley executives such as planner, meta, and openness are catching headlines to trade for their Bruno Cocaine Vascat. Army Reserve UniformA quiet change in the US Navy continues.
How? Well, Navy Chief Technology Officer Justin Fenley says he has spent the past two and a half years, focused on cutting through red tapes and has long been developed by shopping cycles, which once made a nightmare to work with the army. Efforts represent a less visible but potentially more meaningful re -work, where the government is moving rapidly and is more smart about where it is committing the dollar.
“We are more open to business and partnerships than ever before,” Fanley told Tech Crunch in a recent zoom interview. “We’re more humble and listening to, and we recognize that if an organization shows us how we can do business differently, we want it to be a partnership.”
Right now, many of these partnerships are being facilitated by which the Fanley Navy’s innovation is called Kit, a series of framework and tools that aims to eliminate the so -called Valley death, where prototypes are expected to die from production to production. “There was a spaghetti chart to enter your grandfather’s government,” he said. “Now it’s a fireplace, and we are saying, if you can show that you have outdoors, we want to nominate you as an enterprise service.”
In a recent case, the Navy requested an application for a proposal (RFP) application in less than six months with an eight -year -old, Somer Will, Mass -based cyberciction startup. (One of Via’s clients is the American Air Force.)
The Navy’s new approach goes on that Fanley has called the “horizon” model, which borrowed from the Mac Cancity Innovation Framework. Companies go through three steps: diagnosis, structural piloting, and scaling in enterprise services. The key difference with the traditional government agreement is that the Navy now causes problems rather than a pre -determined solution, Fenley said.
“Instead of telling it, ‘hey, we want to solve this problem in such a way that we always have,’ we just say we have a problem, who wants to solve it, and how will you solve it?” Fanley said.
The drive for the navy’s navy is personal. In fact, a scholarship cadet in the Air Force studying electrical engineering, was disqualified from military services due to the problem of lungs. Anyway, determined to serve, he chose the Navy for the private sector offers over 20 years ago because he “wanted to stay around the uniform.” Since then, his career has played a role in defense, intelligence, DRPA and open source measures before returning to the Navy’s department.
The one he is overseeing is opening the doors of companies that have never considered government work before and may have wasted time to try. Fanley points, for example, for a competition through the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), in which the Navy expected a handful of bidders for a niche CyberScurement challenge, but they received about 100 reactions – many of the many companies who had never worked with the same problem.
Fenley says his team has completely dozens of dozens of successes of success, in which a venture -backed Startup used robotic process automation to zip through a two -year invoice back blog in just two weeks. Another example included the plane’s carrier to include network improvement, which saved 5,000 cellar hours in the first month.
Fanieli noted, “This not only changed their availability, but also changed their morale, aspart D -Corps, how much time they could spend in other tasks,” said Fenieli, saying that time saving is one of the five measurements that the Navy used to measure the success of the pilot program. The other four are operational flexibility, per user cost, adaptation, and user experience.
As far as the Navy is looking for the Navy, Fanley identified several top priority areas, including the AI, where the service is actively talking to teams. For those starting, the Navy wants to accelerate the adoption of AI beyond the main generation of AI -use issues, which, from boarding ships and managing personnel to data processing, is involved in more agent applications. He also cited “alternative” GPS, explaining that the Navy is rapidly adopting alternative precision navigation and timing software, especially for integration with unmanned system. And they mentioned the “heritage system of modernization”, saying that the Navy has tried to modernize it includes air traffic control infrastructure and ship -based systems.
So how much money does it make every year to work? Fenellie said he did not have the freedom to provide a specific budget defect, but he said that the Navy currently allocates a single digit for emerging and trade technology compared to traditional defense contractors.
As far as the most common reason is that the trial technologies fail at the time of trial, he said it is not necessary for technical shortcomings. Instead, he said, the Navy works on long budget cycles, and if a new solution does not change or “off” a existing system, funding becomes a problem.
“If we are benefiting and we are measuring this advantage, but in a year and a half, there is no money (attracted to startup) – this is a really bad story for their investors and our customers.” “Sometimes this is a zero game game. Sometimes this is not the case. And if we are going to mold the public private sector more private and on this wave, we have a lot of technical debt that we need to bite.”
During our call, we also asked Fanley whether the Trump administration’s “US First” policies were affecting these processes in any way. Fenley replied that the current focus on domestic manufacturing is well linked to the Navy’s “flexibility” goals (it pointed to digital twins, extra manufacturing, and site productive capabilities that can reduce supply chain dependence).
In any way, the Navy’s message to businessmen and investors is clearly clear that it is a real alternative to traditional trading markets, and it is a pitch that is seen receiving traction in the silicon valley, where a growing welcome to the US government is welcome.
Meta’s Andrew Bose Worth Recently been observed in a recent Bloomberg event In San Francisco: “There is a stronger patriotic underpanning that I think people give credit to Silicon Valley.”
Since observers of the long -standing industry can confirm this, this is a clear change than doubts, which features most of the valley in recent years.
Now, Fanli hopes to attract more and more interests to the Navy, especially to the Navy. He told the Tech Crunch, “I will invite anyone who wants to serve more and more mission to join this journey and join us from the point of view of the maximum mission.”
If you are interested in listening to our full conversation with phenoli, you can check it Right here.