By David W. Cacner and Nathan J. Reeves

David W. Cacner is chief of marketing, NGA/eGEOINT Management Office, and Nathan J. Reeves is a systems architect, NGA contract employee; e-mail: queries1@nga.mil.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) mission requires that it provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in support of national security to its network of partners and customers. The agency’s unique position within the Department of Defense (DoD), as a member of the national intelligence community as well as its role as a combat-support agency, requires that NGA support a diverse set of customers, partners and users who comprise the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG).

As the need for real-time, on-demand geospatial intelligence becomes more critical to national security and the ability to wage a global war on terror, NGA’s support role has taken on greater importance. Recognizing the magnitude of its role, NGA has committed itself to becoming the premier online provider of GEOINT and related services to the NSG community. This commitment, while grand in vision and vast in scope, requires NGA to focus its effort on building an agile and "customer-centric" organization capable of absorbing change and empowering users.

Since its formation 10 years ago, NGA has been aggressively pursuing the integration of its operations and support capabilities. Significant progress has been made during the last decade, but many vertical product lines with little horizontal integration remain, leading to inefficient service delivery and a fragmented user experience.

Although recent technological innovations, specifically those relating to "net-centric" capabilities, can help pursue this fully integrated, customer-centric goal, an organizational paradigm change is required to achieve long-term success.

The convergence of NGA’s 21st Century IT infrastructure must support the next level of GEOINT.

In keeping with the direction toward "net-centricity" provided by DoD, NGA is in the midst of a technical and organizational evolution toward a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that will enable the agency to accomplish its mission and goals. This concept of SOA refers to an information technology (IT) strategy that organizes discrete functions into loosely coupled, interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet mission needs.

The main SOA tenet is to align IT services with business or mission needs; the end goal being to create and maintain an agile organization capable of adapting to change. NGA’s goal for transformation isn’t solely based on an IT initiative; it also requires the agency to evolve the governance structures that drive the planning, acquisition, deployment, and maintenance of IT services and products.

Key to this idea of transformation is the principal of an evolving architecture and organizational system. NGA need not start from scratch by throwing out legacy systems in favor of recreating capabilities using new technologies. The power of a SOA strategy is that legacy systems can be modified as the mission warrants, pursuing horizontal integration among systems and the evolution toward service orientation.

To "jump start" the horizontal integration of existing GEOINT capabilities, through the direction of the eGEOINT Management Office, NGA initiated the GEOINT Online concept, which seeks to promote a "best-of-breed" approach to harmonizing existing services. By pursuing this horizontal approach to integration, NGA hopes to accelerate the return on investment typically seen through transitioning to a shared-services environment.

Strategic Drivers

There are many drivers influencing NGA’s SOA transformation, but none are more important than the need to maintain alignment with NSG partner missions. This alignment isn’t a one-time effort, but a shift in the way NGA plans, acquires, deploys and operates GEOINT capabilities.

Invariably, with the passage of time come changes to mission needs. To mitigate the risk associated with change, organizational agility must be accounted for in the business model, organization and system. The alignment of NGA’s IT capabilities with its mission will ensure world-class, efficient and effective service delivery to NSG customers by providing an agile infrastructure for accessing, creating and disseminating GEOINT.

Another driver influencing NGA’s transformation is its diverse community of customers and partners. NGA supports a vast set of users requiring reliable, responsive and intuitive access to GEOINT data, services and products to conduct their missions.

Palanterra has been engineered to function as a loosely coupled, federated client within a service-oriented architecture.

NGA’s customer community is comprised of DoD customers as well as civilian agencies, local governments, foreign organizations and private-sector users. Quite literally, NGA users can be as varied as high-level U.S. government officials collecting data for policy decisions to private maritime crews researching coastline data prior to port entry.

Some users require real-time, direct access to time-sensitive data, others may want a view of historical data, and some want custom products and services or expert consulting capabilities. Adding to the complexity is the need for machine-to-machine communication inherent to a net-centric environment, thus creating a set of non-human users with a need for continuous data feeds and sophisticated synchronization models.

An overarching driver for change that affects NGA and the DoD as a community is the post 9/11 change from a "need to know" guiding principle to that of a "responsibility to provide." This change in philosophy, while instrumental in waging a war against a decentralized terrorist network, brings to light many challenges inherent to developing trust in a shared environment.

The DoD and IT communities are engaged in multiple transformational communications activities involving new technologies, architectures, policies and concepts, all of which are aimed at changing the way in which DoD community members share intelligence.

Adding to these organizational challenges are the traditional difficulties associated with sharing large GEOINT datasets among agencies and organizations, including the tactical level at which data are created as well as technical and network issues that restrict moving large files over distances. New technologies and increased bandwidth have diminished many of the technical limitations, but, without the proper tools, tactical data will remain inaccessible to community members.

Partnerships

NGA’s successful transformation depends on an accurate understanding of customer and partner needs. To best align its resources with the needs of the NSG community, NGA implemented strategic and tactical partnerships with early adopters to help validate the direction of the agency and identify emerging needs and trends.

Through its work with the Defense Information Systems Agency, NGA is helping to identify and implement a DoD-wide "next-generation" solution for caching large files commonly found in GEOINT applications and products. This new capability, the Enterprise File Delivery (EFD) system, will keep customer file systems in synch with NGA systems, primarily for delivering foundation-level geospatial products.

A "net-centric" SOA provides the foundation for integrated data analysis and delivery.

EFD will be capable of delivering files to users in bandwidth-challenged environments via the Global Broadcast System. Unlike legacy systems, servers won’t be required on the customer side, providing a more flexible model for data subscription.

NGA currently is working with the U.S. Joint Forces Command to implement a formal memorandum of understanding to develop a Joint Geospatial-Intelligence Activity (JGA) to enhance GEOINT among community users. Cross-directorate participation in JGA has been critical to developing a concept of operations and architecture documents.

If any net-centric approach is going to be successful across a decentralized community, there must be a broad-based standards agreement. Recognizing this challenge and the need to involve the public and private sector in the identification and adjudication process, NGA created the Geospatial-Intelligence Standards Working Group (GWG) to address the standards needs of the NSG community.

The GWG was created in 2005 to address interoperability issues in the DoD and intelligence community. The GWG currently receives active participation from all four of the military services and all major combatant commands. NGA also is involved in helping other standards groups, most notably the Open Geospatial Consortium, with the identification of standards to facilitate the sharing of formatted GEOINT data.

NGA actively pursues and strengthens many additional partnerships. Although many of the partnerships are evolving, the decisions to pursue them demonstrate positive leadership and resolve to improve information sharing for warfighters and GEOINT community members worldwide.

Offerings, Toolsets and Data Enabled

The organizational transformation toward a service-oriented enterprise can’t be viewed as a single project, program or deployment. Instead, it’s a systemic change in the way NGA governs itself and services its customers. Although initial successes play an important role in maintaining resolve, the processes implemented to guide the transition are of greater importance to the agency’s long-term success.

Although there’s no single project that can be referenced to prove the early success of the transformation, NGA is beginning to see the fruits of its labor in many of the recent program deployments within the agency.

One such example is the recent deployment of the GEOINT Visualization Services program, which combines a feature-rich Google Earth thick-client application with a set of interoperable standards-based GEOINT services, allowing for improved visualization and analysis of GEOINT data on the desktop.

A key component of the service-oriented transformation at NGA is an effort to deploy an agency-wide SOA infrastructure, providing core SOA components that enable network-service cataloging, discovery, management and run-time governance of reusable SOA services. Benefits of this integration will include the promotion of service discovery, utilization and interoperability among NGA users, partners and customers. After deployment, other NGA programs will integrate their current and planned services, leveraging the discovery, routing and management capabilities provided by the infrastructure.

The aforementioned examples of NGA capabilities are far from complete, but they highlight some of the recent deployments within the agency that will help form the foundation for future GEOINT data access and collaboration.

Future Plans

NGA’s transformation is more than an IT solution to mission needs; it represents a systemic change in the business model through which capabilities are planned, acquired, deployed and managed. To ensure the successful transformation to a customer-centric, service-oriented enterprise, NGA spent considerable time analyzing the governance model required to satisfy this need for change.

Enabling SOA governance processes will facilitate the alignment and rapid integration of GEOINT services. Program authority with governance structures will ensure that all aspects of technology, data, people and processes are appropriately addressed.

The production of a governance roadmap will guide implementation and unify agency processes. The NGA chief information officer has taken the lead on adopting the policies and governance structures identified through analysis of industry best practices.

Parallel to the implementation of governance and policy structures is an effort to harmonize several of the vertically integrated programs that are already in existence and providing valuable support to NSG users. Such harmonization will lead to an environment in which programs begin to identify and share "best-of-breed" services.

The eGEOINT Management Office is leading the effort to provide this horizontal layer of integration via the GEOINT Online (GO) concept. GO’s purpose is to provide a set of enterprisewide services that allow the NSG community to have integrated access to GEOINT content, services, expertise and support as well as integrated discovery, selection, visualization, personalization and collaboration.

GO will act as the unifying construct to NGA’s transformation by promoting NGA as the premier, on-demand GEOINT data, information and knowledge service that provides globally accessible seamless content, related products, services, and access to experts and support—whether from the agency or its business counterparts worldwide—to satisfy the missions of its partners and customers.

NGA has embarked on a critical journey that promises to change the way in which the NSG community talks and collaborates with one another. This journey is one of continuous refinement and evolution toward the vision of mission alignment and organizational agility.

Although success often can be difficult to measure, there’s consensus that warfighters and the global community as a whole depend on NGA’s ability to change the way GEOINT is collected and consumed.