If Future Combat Systems is the “heart” of the Army’s transformation efforts, the Advanced Collaborative Environment might well be the FCS “central nervous system.”

Better known by its acronym, ACE is a leading example of the kind of innovation changing not only the way Boeing, its industry partners and the Army work on FCS but also the way the Department of Defense itself may be headed.

“The Army believes that the FCS ACE program is a very valuable and beneficial program for the Army as well as the entire Department of Defense,” said FCS Program Manager Brig. Gen. Charles Cartwright.

“ACE has already had a major impact on the lifecycle of the FCS weapon platforms and helped to reduce the FCS program timeline,” Cartwright added.

And make no mistake about it, the unprecedented scale of FCS along with its recently accelerated schedules make the need for innovative, efficient program management tools more critical than ever.

In September, 2004, the Army formally recognized the FCS ACE as an “outstanding example of knowledge management initiatives that support enterprise solutions focused on improving situational awareness and decision-making.” This Army award is given annually to “initiatives that provide knowledge-based capabilities…and solutions applicable at the major command, functional community, or Army level.”

Conceived by the Army more than three years ago, ACE has its “home” in the Integrated Defense Systems’ Kent, Washington site. But its reach is as vast as the Internet. ACE is possible because of the ever-widening range of communications possibilities the Internet has spawned. Boeing director of the ACE integrated product team, Rich Crispo, noted that the need for an innovative approach to information management has always been a major part of the Army’s FCS requirements.

“Of the original 35-page FCS request for proposals, eight pages focused exclusively on the need for a collaborative environment to link the customer and hundreds of suppliers,” Crispo said. “But it's also important to know that the Army never required us to deliver a specific ‘product’' per se. They required us to deliver a specific ‘service’ and we've done that with ACE.”

In the last two years, Boeing and its partners on ACE, Science Applications International Corp. and Parametric Technologies Corp. have turned concept into reality.

“We started with five employees and a set of customer requirements. Today we have 130 people working ACE full time around the country,” Crispo said.

A major benefit of ACE is its ability to seamlessly control access to data and information at 16 different levels so people can only see what they need to see. That's very important for a program composed of the Army, Boeing, Science Applications International Corp., 23 major companies, 94 additional suppliers and more than 8,000 individual users.

Other major benefits ACE brings to its users include:

• Enabling the systems engineering, design, development, test, production and support of the integrated FCS systems-of-systems network and platforms.
• Allowing FCS engineers and program managers to conduct preliminary and critical design reviews in a secure environment from hundreds of sites across the country.
• Being a primary medium for support for all of the FCS program decisions and milestone reviews.

As awareness of how the Advanced Collaborative Environment spreads across military and industry, the ACE team is fielding a steadily increasing number of requests for information about how it works and its availability for other programs and applications. “With a program as vast and innovative as FCS, you can’t have anything less innovative than ACE,” Crispo said. “It's gratifying to see the recognition that we've got a new way of doing business here.”