This sounds a bit like my experience in a standard civilian transport company, except that I don't get medals (rightly so) and I don't deal with life and death (thankfully).

Our operational database is still accessed via an emulated version of IBM 3270 terminal [1], where we have Windows emulator for the client that connects to the DB2 database. It's freaking ancient, to the point where the emulated version uses the mouse input to emulate the "light pen" [2] from the original system, which was used because the mouse barely existed at that time. The thing uses 4-letter terminal codes to access every function. Oldschool.

Our employee distribution is quite significantly skewed towards the older generations. Compounding it, many of the people who interact with it tend to be trade-staff who started in workshops then climbed their way into being semi-technical admin (roles such as fleet planning, etc.). It works, but the mind boggles when you imagine the degree of time wasted every day by these guys because they don’t have any sort of significant batch processing capability.

In the course of doing my work, I was exposed at some point to ODBC drivers for the database. I managed to get some credentials used for running reports against it (I think I found another reporting query with them saved in the file and ripped them out of it) which that allowed me to arbitrarily query the database. From that, I started to automate a great many things - for example, where previously a yard coordinator would type in the code to query each storage road individually in his maintenance yard to see what he had around for the day’s work, I gave him a 1-click query for doing the same job.

Our maintenance database was a similar affair, except that it runs Oracle and is a little less antiqued. It also has a windows-native GUI but it is similarly lacking in many batch processes.

A more recent example that I tackled is that every single morning, a yard coordinator would work out which groups of vehicles would be coming in that day and were due for their roadside inspection (info from the operational database). He would then print out a list of these (literally on paper, next to his keyboard) and manually enter each vehicle, 1 by 1, in to the maintenance database to check whether they were then due for their yearly scheduled maintenance before their next roadside inspection. If they were, they'd be flagged for dragging in to the workshop. This took him approximately an hour, every single morning of his work life, and that would then be summed up and presented at his morning planning meeting.

He’d asked the guys who normally support this sort of stuff, but had got nowhere in about 7 months because it sort of fell between “fully-fledged IT department that can do this easily but comes with bureaucracy” and “guy who kind of knows how to develop database queries, but doesn’t know how to query 2 different databases in the one query” and so it never got anywhere. I was on site one morning for some unrelated work and saw him doing this. When I asked about it, I told him to give me some time and I’d come back to him and proceeded to write a query to do it in one click.

I’ve been doing this sort of stuff for about 3-4 years now and have a (good) reputation amongst the maintenance, operations, etc. guys now. The problem is that IT tend not to support them, as it tends to be more effort spent on bureaucracy than the task at hand. Furthermore, the guys don't know who to talk to in order to get this stuff done / don’t know any better, so they just deal with it and do it by hand.

In the end, I guess I did get noticed by middle management because I've now been tasked with being the lead on developing/acquiring a next-gen operations business intel solution which will draw together all the disparate bits of data we gather and put it to better use, so that's cool.

I guess my take-home message is that many of you guys work in the IT space in technology companies. You tend to be exposed to people who just get this stuff and so it all just happens. There's so so many more companies out there though, particularly established ones running operations (think mining, transport & logistics, the army as per the OP, etc.) where this stuff simply isn't done and it's a completely different world. They tend to have a distrust of "IT" because their experience with them is the bloated bureaucratic mess that is many corporate IT departments. IT in large, non-high-tech corporations can also be the sort of place where a problem either is too small to care about, or significant enough that it warrants a legion of SAP/Oracle DBAs and a whole heap of project management to develop a “solution” over a 12+ month period.

There is an astounding amount of potential for someone who gets operations / the guys on the coal-face, and can bring high-tech solutions to their problems rapidly. They will quite literally treat you as some sort of wizard who has mastered the arcane forces if you do this, because you deliver a solution that is otherwise unattainable in many situations. Your business impact is huge because you cut out a whole heap of otherwise wasted time, which is a direct benefit to the bottom line.

The major challenge IT has is bridging this gap. I’m not quite sure how you go about leaning yourself down enough whilst still appealing to the more rigid constraints of “IT in a big corporation” but I am convinced that there is no end of value to be created in this area.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen