Lieutenant General Donna Shipton Visits BESPIN

  • Published
  • By Ronnie Rolph

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE-GUNTER ANNEX, Ala. -- In February 2023, Lieutenant General Donna D. Shipton, Military Deputy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) visited the Business and Enterprise Systems Product Innovation (BESPIN) team at the Collaboration Innovation Center in downtown Montgomery, Ala.

At the Air Force’s sole mobile application software factory, Shipton received a glimpse into how BESPIN is rapidly transforming how the Air Force delivers and uses software to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Airmen around the globe.

So, how do they do it? By maximizing integration! BESPIN specializes in secure Android and Apple application development and deployment from ideation to solution via their fully accredited build/harden/deliver pipeline tools and techniques combined with their flexible and fully repeatable process for producing the Air Force’s preferred on-ramp to Cloud One mobile capability.

Shipton witnessed how Digital University is the leading-edge digital transformation effort to redesign the way the Air Force trains, assesses, and certifies digital skills, by using industry level material to upskill the United States Air Force and Space Force cyber workforces.

BIZINT (Business Intelligence) is a Yelp-like application designed to identify vendors that provide commodities and services in the commercial marketplace.  BIZINT includes a user base of over 4,000 vendors in Europe, supplying operations in support of Ukraine. The United States and nearly 400 partner nations in the European Command are leveraging BIZNIT.

Lastly, Shipton was briefed on Enterprise Services comprised of Team Atlas, Design Studio (DS), AC/DC, Mission Delivery as a Service (MDaaS) and Cloud Ops.

Team Atlas is the foundation for ensuring all BESPIN personnel have swift and secure access to the tools needed to carry out the ecosystem mission. The Design Studio skills are growing the Air Force’s design capability by facilitating the development of user-centered products at scale. AC/DC is a data driven product whose primary objectives are to unlock data, democratize access, and share common data service via service catalog Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

MDaaS is the backbone for Continuous Integration (CI) with a modern DevSecOps toolchain for Apple and Android and finally, the Cloud Ops capability consists of a repeatable process, delivering blueprints of working full-stack app templates and full cloud support.