“The facility will include classroom and design space to support demonstration of and training and education in high-end tools and new capabilities, providing new skills to benefit the current and future high-tech workforces,” OnMain said in a statement to the Dayton Daily News.
The Department of the Air Force’s Digital Transformation Office, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, wants to collaborate “outside the fence” not just with defense industry organizations, but also nontraditional partners, like small businesses, said Kyle Hurst, chief of the office.
“We can always use more mechanisms to kind of get that connectivity, that collaboration, that coordination ahead of time to make sure that those small businesses understand what our needs are, what our caps our, what they can deliver for us,” he said. “Our office will be definitely present, definitely around that facility.”
Details about the Digital Transformation Center seedling space were shared during the 2023 Digital Transformation Summit held last month at Sinclair College.
The seedling space is expected to include offices, collaboration areas, a training classroom and a digital design studio, with computers and digital tools. The new space is expected to be ready for tenants this fall.
The space is expected to offer training courses, certification courses, intern and co-op placement aid, digital transformation community events and Digital Transformation Office technical exchanges, according to slides from a presentation OnMain gave during the summit. There’s also room available for future growth for industry tenants.
According to building permit information submitted to the city of Dayton, the InterMed renovation project is expected to cost about $300,000. The InterMed building is near UD’s campus and the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds, which is being targeted for redevelopment into a new “imagination district.”
The Air Force Materiel Command two years ago announced the creation of a new Digital Transformation Office at Wright-Patt to manage digital transformation activities across the Air and Space Force.
The command said digital transformation is crucial to design, develop, test and field complex weapon systems with speed — in years, instead of in decades.
Modernizing technology and digital tools is critical to ensure the U.S. Air Force can keep up with rapidly-evolving threats posed by the nation’s adversaries, said Hurst, with the Digital Transformation Office, which has about 10 to 12 personnel at Wright-Patt.
Hurst said research has found that on average it takes more than 16 years to develop and put weapons systems into the field.
China, by comparison, has an acquisition timeline of about seven years, he said.
“We’re fielding stuff from 2005, in what we thought we’d need,” he said. “The real kind of strategic imperative is go faster — we need to accelerate that acquisition speed that we have, especially when we compare it to our peers, our competitors, the threats out there.”
New digital tools and software that are being developed and used by small businesses and nontraditional Air Force partners may be able to help improve the acquisition process to deploy weapons systems more quickly, officials said.
Small changes in processes can impact the quality, speed or cost of projects and work products.
Training also is key to ensure the workforce has the skills needed to work with cutting-edge technologies and tools.
Hurst helped author a new white paper that was published Monday about a new approach to accelerate the acquisition materiel lifecycle to meet Air Force’s and the Air Force Materiel Command’s strategic objectives.
OnMain also submitted an application to the Dayton Region Priority Development and Advocacy Committee (PDAC) requesting $10 million in funds for a $70.7 million Digital Transformation Center project on the former fairgrounds property.
The project has been identified as a priority, but only a small number of PDAC projects that seek government funding actually get it.
The PDAC process often is viewed as a wish list of local projects.
The PDAC application says the proposed 125,000-square-foot Digital Transformation Center could house the Digital Twin Incubator, the Digital Twin Center of Excellence, Ohio University’s Digital Design Studio and the Digital Enterprise for Applied Learning.
Most of the proposed five-story center would have collaborative project and administrative space for Air Force personnel and industry partners, and the Air Force’s Digital Transformation Office would have a collaborative presence there, according to documents included in the PDAC application.
Officials with Ohio University’s Russ College of Engineering and Technology last year said the college is collaborating with the corporation Siemens to create a digital design studio in Dayton where Air Force personnel, contractors, and Ohio University faculty and staff can collaborate on digital engineering projects.
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