Letitia Long, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, provided a four-point plan for making her vision a reality. Last year at the GEOINT conference she emphasized that she wanted to put the power of geospatial intelligence in the hands of more users. This year she updated the GEOINT Symposium audience with the progress that the agency has made. The four elements of the plan are:
CONTENT - The goal is to expose 100% of the content within the agency and make it discoverable. Any source material, commercial and NRO imagery; foundation data, whether it is spatial or aspatial in nature ... Whatever is in the analyst's shoebox and especially finished product she wants posted on NGA website.
OPEN IT ENVIRONMENT - Long wants an environment that is two way where users can contribute to the CONTENT environment as well.
CUSTOMER SERVICE - Long emphasized that it is all about the user experience. "We are a full service organizations; we understand the user's footprint and can anticipate the needs of our customers; we need an open IT environment to expose all that content," she said. "We will always be embedded with our mission partner; but increasingly our mission partners are GIS-savvy. We encourage it. For users needing assisted service they can enter into a chat with an analyst that helps the mobile force in certain challenges, what Long calls proactive assisted service.
ANALYTICS DEPTH - Long emphasized that when content is easily accessible and the user is being served, then the NGA can get to the deeper analytics. Long said that over 100 applications for mobile use were being developed and she demonstrated an iPad app developed by NGA to help disaster response team.
