The facilitated session brought chaplains and RPs together with Navy’s Digital Transformation Office (DTO) to learn how to create and use a low-code/no-code solution, in this case a platform called ServiceNow hosted within Navy’s cloud environment.

The targeted five-day hackathon addressed the digital challenges chaplains face when tracking Sailor engagement across the fleet, how to enhance user adoption by a cadre of more than 1,600 chaplains and RPs and how these cloud hosted applications can make important contributions to the Navy’s designated data environment called Jupiter.

Unlike other Navy ‘hackathons’, where a younger student audience gathers to compete and cooperate, testing their skills or producing developmental products, Navy DTO, with ServiceNow’s support, had a more focused goal—user developed apps

“Twenty chaplains and RPs walked into a room and at the end of the week, they walked out with a working beta application that directly addressed their operational needs,” said Capt. Glen Wood, Chaplain Religious Program Analytics Tool Operations Officer.

Wood has been engaged with Navy DTO for months in the lead-up to the “Chap App” hackathon, ensuring more than 1,800 requirements and legacy data collection could be organized and consolidated to a hierarchy of five major requirements with subordinate elements. That effort, managed through DTO’s tailored blend of operational and software systems engineering expertise was the critical element used to guide, select and champion the right solution for the chaplains’ needs and support increased user adoption.

Day one, the participants were introduced to what low-code/no-code software solutions meant and could produce. Day two instructed participants on how to build notional applications for generic business purposes. Days three and four, the team turned their learning and their specific requirements into a working beta application, supported on desktop and mobile. Day five, the

group conducted a demonstration for the OPNAV Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Dr. Patrick O’Connell, and Rear Admiral Gregory Todd, Chaplain of the Marine Corps and Deputy Chief of Chaplains.

“Before, we couldn’t get all of our chaplains and RPs access to a single tool. Now in just a couple days we have a low bandwidth capability that lets us collect data across the force and analyze it,” said Wood.

The DTO and chaplains corps plan to test and iterate their Beta product incrementally throughout the entire Chaplain Corps, with an initial operational capability planned for October 2021. At full operational capability, the chaplains will consolidate more than four years’ worth of data from legacy systems into the Jupiter cloud data environment to enable reporting and analysis on behavioral trends and chaplain force laydown. Their intent is to ensure Navy can stay ahead of chaplain manpower distribution and needs while improving their Sailor engagement.

“DTO sees this hackathon as a great success for the chaplains, but also proof of concept that this type of facilitated engagement is the modern way to guide other digital transformation efforts within the Navy. This event also demonstrates how many Navy equities could benefit from low-code and no-code solutions,” said Lt. Cmdr. David Carroll, the DTO Technical Director. “Efforts like the Chap App hackathon show how Navy can quickly realize greater capability at lower costs with today’s technology”.