The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has released a New Data Strategy, outlining its plans to transform and improve the way data is created, managed, and shared in order to maintain dominance in the delivery of geospatial intelligence.
“The growth in GEOINT data from government and commercial sources here and around the world is staggering. This exponential growth in data leads us to one of our biggest challenges: managing all of the data,” Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, Director, NGA, said at the 2021 GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri.
The NGA Data Strategy 2021, a 28-page public document, includes both strategic goals and courses of action for the agency as it continues to chart a secure and innovative path forward while facing increasing amounts of data, risk, and competition.
Aligned to the agency’s Moonshot effort to “deliver trusted GEOINT with the speed, accuracy, and precision required,’’ the strategy calls for the accelerated, shared, and trusted use of data to help NGA better deliver on its mandates and show the way. In July, NGA opened its Moonshot Labs in downtown St. Louis, a workspace where government analysts and startups will collaborate.
The strategy describes four key goals being pursued by NGA to meet its mission and business needs. To achieve its desired results, the agency seeks to:
- Manage data as a strategic asset: Deploy a federated enterprise data governance framework that ensures data is proactively, strategically, and consistently managed while enabling agility, flexibility, and innovation.
- Deliver data as a shared service: Provide services that deliver data — both consumed and created — directly to consumers in an efficient and intuitive way.
- Scale data and analytics capabilities: Champion data-informed innovations that transform how NGA operates; set the example for data and analytics excellence and leading practices within the IC, DOD, and geospatial community.
- Bolster data literacy in the workforce: Promote a data culture and increase the workforce’s data acumen.
So why a data strategy, and why now?
“Today, data is our most powerful, non-depletable, durable strategic asset. As NGA’s Chief Data Officer and Chief Data Scientist, our shared goal is to provide a vision and a plan of what we as an agency want to do with our data and how we begin to support accessing, sharing, and managing the content and analytics. The NGA Data Strategy will focus on making data easily discoverable and accessible, improve data reuse and create cross-domain efficiencies for next-generation GEOINT enablement. It is our humble attempt to influence our culture through continuously improving our critical, foundational data capabilities, mission models, and digital tradecraft to better serve our customers and maintain our GEOINT supremacy,” said Deepak Kundal, Chief Data Officer, NGA, and Andrew L. Brooks, Chief Data Scientist, NGA in the document.
Focus Areas
The data strategy, combined with the established collaborative data governance program, guides the agency’s push to close the gap between current and future capabilities by accelerating developments in four significant focus areas:
- Easily Discoverable and Accessible Data
- Improved Data Reuse and Integration
- Cross-Domain Efficiencies
- Next-Generation GEOINT
Data Governance and AI/ML Initiatives
Data is at the heart of all AI/ML initiatives. This data strategy reinforces Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Augmentation (AAA) efforts such as algorithm governance to ensure NGA has a consistent approach to building, managing, maintaining, and deploying its models for the enterprise. Supporting NGA’s mission AI use cases, including ML, computer vision, and natural language processing techniques is a key priority for this Data Strategy. Data governance efforts will support better AI outcomes by improving the sources of data used for training. Further, data governance will help curate a knowledge base about data sources — both internal and external — including known potential features and bias.
Accelerating startups and industry collaboration
The NGA also wants to make it easier for new entrants to do business with the government. Cindy Daniell, Director of Research, NGA in her address at the 2021 GEOINT Symposium said, “The agency is now focused on accelerating innovation by working more closely with the private sector and making it easier for geospatial technology players to do business with NGA. We will need to expand our partnerships with all sources of innovation in the commercial space.”
One of the most recent initiatives is a startup accelerator program based in St. Louis where NGA is building a $1.7 billion campus known as NGA West. “We couldn’t be happier with how construction efforts have been going. We’re actually building Next NGA West with discovery and connection in mind,” said Vice Admiral Sharp in his keynote address at the 2021 Symposium.
“When it’s done, it’ll be unlike any other facility in the intelligence community, you’ll have 20% of its total space dedicated to unclassified work. What better place to collaborate and innovate and to invite academia, private companies, industry partners, and local community to engage directly with us?” he added.
