Official: Army needs to put data to good use on the battlefield

An Army Cyber Command official says the biggest challenge the command faces is using the large amounts of data it collects to effectively achieve an outcome.

Col. Ian Tarasevitch, director of current operations for the command, said at an Association of the United States Army event this week, "There's a lot of information out there -- how do we get that information that drives a decision that leads to an action that results in an outcome? I don't want to be at the place where I'm just watching things passively. I need to get to the point where I can take action and change what we're doing in the field. Until we get to that point, everything else we're doing is really just . . . a waste of taxpayer dollars."

Tarasevitch said a big part of putting data to operational use is the ability to quantify risk, and the command should be able to "take information [and] put it on a screen in a manner that actually informs risk and drives decision."

"There [are] a lot of things we don't do because we can clearly see the risk of taking the given action, but we don't stop and say, 'What’s the risk of not taking this action?'" he said.