The Defence Digital Foundry is a new 'team of teams' in MOD which aims to create excellent digital services for defence users - and at the same time, provide platforms and tools that help others to build great services quickly and consistently. The Foundry is integral to how MOD is turning last year's Digital Strategy for Defence into action.
What have we been doing?
Since we began on our journey to create the Defence Digital Foundry, our main effort has been - and always will be - delivering value to defence users:
- We've continued to provide common low-code platforms, which make it easy for delivery teams across defence to build and deploy apps at scale. There are currently over 250K uses of these apps every month, ranging from simple online forms to complex applications, such as the end-to-end recruitment process in a major business unit.
- We've achieved a Minimum Viable Product of our DevSecOps platform, which enables delivery teams to develop and deploy their bespoke apps at OFFICIAL, including appropriate security assurance. So far, six development teams have onboarded, and we're in discussion with many more.
- We've 11 defence use-cases in production on our data and analytics platform, including for Space Command and the RAF, for example, imagery analysis.
- We've continued to develop our various user-facing digital services in Discovery, Alpha and Beta.
We've also been developing our organisation and how it will work, we have:
- been bringing together the central digital delivery teams in Defence Digital to create a new, single organisation.
- set up the Defence Artificial Intelligence Centre (DAIC) along with partners in other areas of defence. The DAIC will promote and develop the safe and responsible use of AI in defence.
- set up our enabling teams, including a financial, commercial and talent "Engine Room" to help delivery teams get what they need quickly.
- brought user-centred design into the heart of every digital project, learning more about users, and developing our approach to commissioning, running and managing discoveries in defence.
What are we going to be doing next?
The Foundry's teams have come together and agreed on their overall mission for the coming quarter. As well as continuing to deliver value to users, we will aim to achieve "Critical Mass" as an organisation, where our people feel part of a supportive 'team of teams', able to scale and recruit at pace and make collective resourcing decisions. We'll also aim to:
- Have set out clear communicable set of Foundry services, with straightforward ways for people to understand and engage with those services
- Document and automate our ways of working as much as possible to make it easier to build services in defence which are secure and user-centric by design.
- Develop the process for how we engage with ideas and proposals and how we triage and prioritise work.
- Set up cross-cutting 'Digital Communities' for digital practitioners in line with the DDaT framework, giving the disciplines a place to grow, learn and share.
And finally - we'll aim to 'work out loud' - so watch this space for future blog posts from the Foundry's teams. A lot is going on, and we're keen to share as much as possible.