Meet the Gamechanging App That Uses AI to Simplify DoD Policy Making

  • By: JAIC Public Affairs
Meet the Gamechanging App That Uses AI to Simplify DoD Policy Making

Imagine you are a DoD action officer starting the process of publishing a new policy. You need to ensure that the new policy does not conflict with or duplicate existing issuances and other guidance. How do you approach such a complex task without trying to locate every related policy statement? Then, how do you assess the new policy’s alignment with what is already in place?

Tens of thousands of documents govern how the DoD operates. Navigating this ever-expanding policy domain requires searching through documents that 1) exist in different repositories, 2) reside on various networks, 3) are updated independently, and 4) evolve rapidly. A solution is needed to help efficiently search and analyze the universe of DoD rules and regulations so evidence-based, data-driven policy decisions can be made without wasting time and effort.

Streamlining Policy Analysis with GAMECHANGER

To reduce the manual and time-consuming process, the JAIC and Advana, in partnership with WHS, built GAMECHANGER. The application is designed to drive search, understanding, and analysis of DoD requirements documents using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technologies. Launched in May 2020, GAMECHANGER for Policy enables DoD policy analysts and action officers to expediently identify and analyze policy documents from across the enterprise using a search capability founded in replicable, generalizable, and scalable technology.

GAMECHANGER is part of the Advana platform, the Department’s enterprise data and analytics platform that supports our senior-most decision-makers with executive dashboards, data tools, and other analytics products. As one of Advana’s largest and most widely used apps, GAMECHANGER is already improving how action officers navigate information to reach timely decisions.

GAMECHANGER for Policy now includes documents from numerous sources. 7,000 users users have conducted over 101,000 queries using the application. Users have said that the app has quickly become a “one-stop-shop,” saving hours of scouring different sources. With the ability to find references that policymakers may not have considered otherwise, DoD is better positioned to mitigate policy conflicts, analyze the economic impacts of policy changes, and align policy requirements with a defense strategy.

Supporting the Policy Maker

With GAMECHANGER for Policy, users benefit from the commercial cloud, open-source solutions, and best practices from academia, industry, and government experts. The application offers many advantages, including:

  • Authoritative Knowledge: Provides a single, comprehensive, trusted repository of all DoD governing requirements, with every relevant document already integrated into the platform’s body of knowledge.
  • Keyword and Intelligent Search:Allows users to quickly and easily query the policy archive to identify relevant rules, regulations, and policies requirements and track roles, responsibilities, functions, strategies, missions, and more.
  • Knowledge Graph: Visually depicts relationships among documents and entities to reveal interdependencies, connection points, redundancies, and/or inconsistencies across requirements.
  • Built to Scale: Enables application cloning for new use cases and supports collaborative development of open-source technologies with military personnel, DoD civilians, and contractors.
  • Natural Language Processing: Ensures linked requirements are never out of sync by leveraging an agile machine learning operations (MLOps) process to continually refine NLP technologies, including AI and ML capabilities, which train automation models to identify, aggregate, ingest, and integrate data sources.

Building Additional Capabilities

The JAIC continues to improve GAMECHANGER, including ongoing ingestion of new data and the development of groundbreaking policy analyst tools based directly on user feedback. In the coming months, the team will launch a new Document Comparison Tool that allows users to upload draft policies and run a comparison against all existing documents in the repository. Users will be notified of semantically similar documents at both the overall document level and paragraph/sentence level. This will allow unprecedented insight into how a new policy would impact existing policies and any downstream effects of publishing the new policy.

Scalable for New Use Cases

While the core GAMECHANGER application focuses on DoD policy, the platform is scalable and extensible to any number of NLP use cases. Since its inception, GAMECHANGER has attracted and continues draw its portfolio of stakeholder use cases (40+). One such example is the Electronic Document Access (EDA) clone, an ongoing project that allows search and discovery across all DoD contract data. If you have a use case in mind, get in touch with the GAMECHANGER team.

Furthermore, the GAMECHANGER code is fully open-sourced and accessible on GitHub. Open sourcing the application not only allows other organizations and individuals to leverage the work the DoD has already done in modernizing the policy, guidance, and strategy space but also provides the opportunity for anybody to improve on the application through contribution. Take a look at https://github.com/dod-advana/gamechanger.