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What is in your suitcase? Why is that a challenge for R2O?

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Almost everyone brings a suitcase when they travel. The size of the suitcase and its contents depend on the length of the trip, the destination, and the personal preferences of the traveler. Some people travel light while others travel with many different forms and options of attire, as well as varying amounts of personal items. In almost all suitcases, there will be shirts, pants, socks, shoes, and toiletries, but one person’s suitcase may have dozens of different shirts while another may have just a few. If you examine how practitioners perform their jobs and specific tasks, you will find that there are many different ways to create the same deliverable, or information product, such as a meteorologist creates a weather forecast. There are some practitioners that use a few reliable tools or sources for crafting their deliverables while others elect to have a broader selection at their fingertips, even if they do not use each item regularly. This is no different than the suitcases, eac...
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Preliminary, non-operational, but used operationally? Huh?

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The ‘O’ in R2O is sometimes confounding. Whereas the realm of research is an expansive net for innovation, the concept of operations is more of a broadening spectrum. What constitutes operations? When is a research byproduct considered operational? Does an operational status confer consistency and reliability requirements? Must training be available for operations before a research byproduct is operational? Who decides whether a transitioned research byproduct should be used operationally? These are not necessarily easy questions to answer, and they may vary depending on the nature of the project and byproduct, but there are some guidelines that can make it easier to assess where in the R2O cycle a transitioned item sits in its readiness for application to an organization’s deliverables and services. First, it is important to define the portion of an organization or enterprise that constitutes “operations” at the onset of the research—before it is ready for any demonstration . There ...
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Peer review and R2O

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One area of increasing confusion is the difference between the scientific peer review and research to operations processes, and their relative value for a new research byproduct. To some extent, that value depends on the organization or enterprise. But peer review and R2O are two separate processes, and the comparison between them is a matter of “apples and oranges”. They both have important roles but serve different purposes. Scientific peer review exists to make sure that a given research byproduct is valid in the realm of science from which it was derived. While science evolves, the peer review process has a defined starting and ending point, where the end is usually a publication that can be further scrutinized by the broader scientific community. The R2O process, typically internal to an organization, evolves with the progress of a research byproduct and sometimes does not reach a conclusion as it iterates over the lifecycle of a byproduct in operational status. Allow me to illust...
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Knowledge, skills, and mental representations

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It can be confounding that there are not necessarily similar specific attributes of research byproducts that achieve a successful R2O transition and become routinely useful in an operational environment. While there are certain elements common to the R2O process and how a product is presented that increase the likelihood of a successful transition, there is no common strategy to pursue to guarantee a winner . Transitioned research byproducts are comprised of scientific knowledge such that they present new information in a way that serves as a basis for making, or at least altering, operational decisions. Knowledge and information alone are a small piece of the “puzzle” for the practitioner. Retention of knowledge and information is difficult, even in the short-term, but it becomes even more challenging if the practitioner has to reason about how to apply it – that is, finding out how it “fits”. This is abstract because it is quite primitive in that it relates to how humans learn and t...
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Keeping new datasets in step with modern organizations using R2O

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Underlying transitions from research to operations are typically some critical sources of raw data or observations that can further an operational objective or priority when provided to practitioners and applied to the mission. In early stages, there is often at least some degree of research involvement in either setting the specifications of the instruments that will take new observations, or establishing concepts and performance specifications for potential derived research byproducts from those observations. Most successful iterations of the R2O cycle consume a few years at the very most. What happens, then, when there are observing system or new dataset procurements that take a decade or longer? Consider this case study. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R-Series (GOES-R) launched in November 2016 after years of planning and preparation. As a weather satellite, GOES-R will be able to provide operational meteorologists with imagery of atmospheric patterns and cl...
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