0.2: I’ve Always Been a Data Nerd

2LT Davis’ first office, circa 2004, Ar Ramadi. It even had windows, or periscopes at least. The FBCB2 is the computer screen on the left.

I built my first computer in 1997 when I was 16. That certainly doesn’t make me a child prodigy, and is several years late compared to plenty of other nerds of my generation. But it’s part of an early proclivity for things digital and data.

I followed this up by starting a computer science degree at Michigan State University before graduating with a telecommunications degree (notice the switch there?). I paid for my college with an Army ROTC scholarship with the intent of doing four years in the signal corps and getting out.¹ Twenty-one years later, I’m due to pin on a colonel’s eagles. I never ended up spending a day in the signal corps, starting instead in the infantry before being selected for special forces.²

From the very beginning of my Army career, I have leveraged data literacy to gain advantage. As I laid out in my last post, I define data literacy as the ability to:

• Digitize information into data structures. Turn analog material into structured information that computers can use.

• Build processes that leverage data. Create better user experiences (Ux)³ that enable you to get, analyze, and share data faster.

• Critically assess data to make decisions. Put data into context so you can determine what matters, what doesn’t, and what you don’t know.

I didn’t set out with a plan to be driven by data, but as I look back on my career, my bias to leverage each of those abilities was there right from the start.

1. Digitize information into data structures.

I was essentially born a digital native. My father was an Electronic Technician in the US Coast Guard, and purchased a Commodore 64 when I was just two years old. We had an Apple II GS when none of my friends even knew how to type. Dad started taking me to computer shows in the early 90s and taught me how to build computers part by part. I think the longest I’ve been without a computer since was the nine weeks I spent at Ranger School.

So, it’s not surprising in retrospect that as an Infantry company XO⁴ one of the first things I did was digitize the company’s personnel paperwork into a Microsoft Access database.⁵ I built an onboarding tool for new soldiers that gathered all their data and then automated work like generating weapons cards and hand receipts. I also had it generate a report each month of all the birthdays for every soldier, spouse, and child in the company. Want to blow a young private’s mind? Have his company commander interrupt him in the hallway and tell him to take the afternoon off to go give his wife flowers for her birthday.

2. Build processes that leverage data.

I leverage data mostly because I’m incredibly lazy. I will drag a rower across the entire gym to avoid taking any extra steps mid-workout to a pull-up bar. I also loathe inefficiency, which may be a symptom of my neuro-spiciness.

Leveraging data has given me the one thing no one else can give me: time. I had more time in command than my peers because I didn’t have to waste a minute of it on menial tasks that could be automated. Data literacy also helped me see what really mattered in the forest of red boxes on PowerPoint and ignore what didn’t. I used it to get more time to be out with my soldiers, developing training plans, and mentoring young leaders.

As a new second lieutenant in Ar Ramadi, I leveraged Garmin’s free software GPSMAP to download the track data off my soldiers’ personal GPSs. I could then splice all the tracks together and then reupload the ever-growing roadmap onto the Garmins of every soldier in the company. It became a poor man’s replacement for FBCB2.⁶ We used this improvised road map to make our raids more precise, and it became the norm for my soldiers to drop their Garmins off before each mission so I could upload the waypoints, then again upon return so I could steal any updates to the routes.

3. Critically assess data to make decisions

I’m curious by nature as well. I took a broad swath of classes at Michigan State including history, anthropology, economics, and sailing. Later I earned two master’s degrees, one in Terrorism at King’s College and the other in Strategy and International Diplomacy at London School of Economics. To learn about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I took up playing with the image generating software Stable Diffusion. I want to know things.

One of the best ways I’ve found to test your existing assumptions, and to find your blind spots, is to use data. Back In Ramadi, as I collected all those Garmin tracks, I was able to build a heat map of the routes we’d been taking. Overlaying them with IED strikes gave us a good sense of the difference between attacks on where we were going versus ones that might instead be a way to keep us out.⁷ It helped us decide which roads to avoid, and which alternate routes to use more.

Those are just three short vignettes of how I’ve used data in my career. The rest of Downrange Data will cover more. Many of these stories will revolve around just how horrible PowerPoint is to your organization’s systems, processes, and thinking (again, kill it if you can). These stories help explain what ‘data literacy’ actually means in real life. Hopefully there’s at least one vignette that helps you with your current organization.

I am arrogantly data.⁸ It is almost always the first place I look for a solution. But here at the outset, I want to be clear: Nothing that follows is because I am uniquely gifted. I am not the key ingredient in any of these vignettes; leveraging data is.

Anyone can make the things I made, usually with little more than an afternoon on Google, Reddit, or YouTube. Many can make them far better. But for most of my career I have been one of the few people in my unit that bothered to leverage data, but not the only one. Anyone could have joined us, but only a few did.⁹

Data works. I’ll discuss pitfalls and lessons learned, but none of these outweigh its benefits. I know this because I’ve seen what it can do. Those in charge may look at you sideways when you’re a nerd. But in 21 years, not a single commander or supervisor has asked me to do it less. The best leaders I had took body blows for me because they saw what could be done with it. The worst ones simply took credit for its benefits. There were plenty of ‘analog guys’ who didn’t want to be bothered with the details of the digital systems, but they all wanted the rewards. Not a single leader in my career ever said, ‘Stop doing that’.

Before we get started though, I owe you readers a run down on why I hate PowerPoint so much. See you in four days.

1. Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). One of four ways to become a commissioned officer in the military. Follow the link if you’re interested in a reverse G.I. Bill where you get the college money up front.

2. Special Forces or SF. The eponymous Green Berets of the John Wayne film. Not to be confused with the completely different SOF (Special Operations Forces).

3. User Experience. While we often say ‘user interface’, (UX) is bigger. It’s understanding how ease of use and efficiency encompasses everything about how someone interacts with your product. I’ll offer tips in 4.3: Towards Better Ux.

4. XO - Executive Officer. In units below the brigade level, they are the second in command. XOs are often responsible for transforming their commander’s impossible dreams into some sort of reality. Famous XO’s you might be familiar with are Destro from G.I. Joe and No. 2 from the Austin Power’s Series.

5. Microsoft Access - A database program that’s never progressed much beyond niche users. It’s suffered because it’s not nearly as easy to learn by FAFO as Excel. As each version of Excel became more and more able to do Access-like functions, it became less and less worth the effort to learn. Rumors of its death are an exaggeration, but there’s something to be said when ‘Is MS Access Still Relevant’ is a Google Autocomplete.

6. FBCB2 - Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below was an Army system for tracking friendly forces and communicating commands across the formation digitally. I first got to use the system in Ar Ramadi in 2004, and at the time it was the only way to see digital maps on the move. It had some chat capability, which I used to chat with a fellow deployed Michigan State Alum in Baghdad. However, as an organization we barely used the capabilities of the system, largely because of a lack of digital literacy across our formation, especially in our leadership.

7. IED - Improvised Explosive Devices. Bombs. They’re just bombs. The Army loves its initialisms, especially the three letter ones.

8. ‘Arrogantly Data’ was the working title of this Substack for a while.

9. Some of these solutions will appear backward to those outside of the military. I’ve had to pursue low-code and often no-code solutions because, for some understandable reasons, getting your own code to run on a Department of Defense (DoD) network is a lot of work. As an example, my email server kicks back any email with python code attached.