The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General has released their report on an audit to determine whether Army officials effectively managed the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program to meet user needs.

IVAS is a $21.88 Billion program to field a militarized version of Microsoft’s HoloLens. Modifications were based on seven requirements that enhance the Soldier’s decisions and capabilities to execute combat tasks with speed and precision identified by the Soldier lethality cross-functional team: communication, lethality, mobility, protection, situational awareness, survivability, and training and human performance.

This program is so important to the Army that it even has its own Program Manager under PEO Soldier. During development PM IVAS used Soldier Centered Design during multiple testing events in the IVAS rapid prototyping phase. This process is intended to ensure that Soldier needs are considered when making design tradeoffs and production decisions.  A core metric is user acceptance.

Unfortunately, the IG found that program officials did not define minimum user acceptance levels to determine whether IVAS would meet user needs because Army policy does not require program officials to define suitable user acceptance levels.  

Consequently, the IG recommends that the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology) develop Army?wide policy requiring program officials to define suitable user acceptance measurements for testing and evaluation.

Furthermore, they also recommend that the Program Executive Officer Soldier define clear measures of user acceptance levels to meet user needs before Soldier Touch Point?5 testing of IVAS.  In addition, they recommend that the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology), as the decision authority for IVAS, verify whether the Program Executive Office Soldier meets established user acceptance measures and addresses Soldier?identified issues before IVAS production.

This should help satisfy those who feel that the program is moving too quickly, is technologically immature, or does not have Soldier buy-in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 at 10:00 and is filed under Optics, PEO-Soldier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.