INSTITUTE FOR WATER RESOURCES
Members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Civil Works Business Intelligence (CWBI) team took home the 2022 IWR Team of the Year for their cloud migration work on behalf of the Civil Works mission. Pictured in a group photo, the team gathered at the Risk Management Center for its first annual in-person meeting following COVID-19 travel restrictions to discuss a range of infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, and administrative topics. USACE PHOTO
Engineering in the Cloud In the past, when someone at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) mentioned clouds, they most often were referring to the weather. However, in today’s modern context, “the cloud” can mean many things. At USACE’s Institute for Water Resources (IWR), it most often describes the Civil Works Business Intelligence (CWBI) program. CWBI has been a USACE leader in cloud implementation over the past 10 years, and continues to refactor Civil Works data and system assets to gain efficiencies, integrate resources, and reduce information technology (IT) maintenance and cost.
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he CWBI program is one of USACE’s key automated information systems (AIS) and is a critical backbone to the Civil Works mission. “CWBI touches almost every aspect of the Civil Works mission as it relates to data and information delivery,” said Edward E. Belk Jr., director of Civil Works. “We rely on the cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity implementation, and system engineering services CWBI provides to ensure critical data and analysis mission requirements are
BY JUSTIN PUMMELL
122 I AMERICA’S ENGINEERS
met.” CWBI’s current purpose is to integrate Civil Works data in a cloud-smart environment that standardizes data organization and management, ensures cybersecurity, delivers innovative technology solutions, rationalizes resources, and enhances visualization. CWBI currently supports more than 100 Civil Works applications across the USACE enterprise, and is used widely by internal and external stakeholders. CWBI partners with multiple entities within USACE, federal partners, and others to deliver data and resources where it is needed most. For example, CWBI’s cloud
infrastructure serves as the backbone to help regulatory permits be issued, the public understand where levees and dams are located, and to deliver navigation charts to vessel operators traversing inland waterways. CWBI is led by a small program management office overseen by IWR and the USACE Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab’s Remote-Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) Center of Expertise. “As the first production cloud operating environment within USACE, CWBI has transitioned standalone applications to a cloud environment [with] levels of computational capacity, data management, data interconnectivity, and cybersecurity that were unattainable only a few years ago,” stated Joe Manous, Ph.D., IWR director. “These accomplishments are why the CWBI team was recognized as the IWR 2022 Team of the Year.” CWBI leverages the cloud in benefit of the Civil Works mission to deliver critical products to decision-makers and the public. For example, CWBI is responsible for providing a common resource in the cloud to collect data for Civil Works operation and maintenance (O&M) activities. CWBI then couples the O&M information with financial details from other USACE AIS to help report program status, performance metrics, and compliance with legislation and regulation. “CWBI plays a vital role in the hydropower business line’s understanding of the operational performance of its generating assets,” said David Sanna, USACE Hydropower Digital Transformation lead. “Hydropower has worked directly with the CWBI team to develop and deploy a new hydropower homepage within the CWBI platform, which establishes a central hub for communication, data-reporting, and visualization of key performance metrics
