INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: Raytheon
Jane Chappell
Vice President
Strategic Intelligence Systems
Raytheon
Jane P. Chappell is vice president of Strategic Intelligence Systems, a business unit of Intelligence and Information Systems. Chappell is responsible for providing leadership and strategic direction, as well as driving growth and managing program execution. She has more than 22 years experience with Raytheon, progressing through various engineering and management positions.
From 1999 to 2002, Chappell served as MIND program manager for MIND Element Garland and San Jose development and systems engineering activities.
From 1997 to 1999, Chappell was a senior lead on the MIND proposal. She received the Tim Moe award in 1999 for outstanding achievement in business development. From 1994 to 1997, she was program manager for development of a multi-platform infrastructure product.
From 1993 to 1994, she was lead software systems engineer and responsible for architecture design and cost estimation for large distributed, high-speed data transfer client/server information system proposals. From 1992 to 1993, Chappell was a deputy program manager responsible for developing inter-segment system-level analysis tools including interface simulators, network connectivity and network throughput. From 1991 to 1992, she was software manager with responsibility for developing applications for import, export, display and manipulation of source meta data.
Q: Can you tell us about your business?
A: Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems [IIS], leverages its domain expertise, technical excellence and world-class people in developing leading-edge solutions through our core capabilities: operations, maintenance and engineering, mission management, signal and image processing, command and control of air and space vehicles, geospatial intelligence, knowledge management, information security and systems integration.
Q: What does your business provide to the customer?
A: My business is the Strategic Intelligence Systems within our IIS business. My business provides our customers with actionable intelligence to enable them to more efficiently and effectively complete their mission. Our heritage has historically been about providing high-performance, high-reliability data capture, processing and dissemination systems. We continue to provide those services, and in addition are providing increased automated sharing and analysis of data resulting in predefined rule-based actions. This is all focused on allowing the systems to do the routine analysis and actions and letting our analysts focus on the hard problems.
Q: What are some of your business’s other solutions?
A: A major program we have co-developed is the Distributed Common Ground System 10.2 contract with the Air Force. This again is about a common multi-sensor system that brings together disparate types of data and applies common applications.
DCGS will bridge the ISR stovepipes with Webbased technologies and significant automation of data sharing. It will function as a single enterprise network for rapidly disseminating and storing a wide range of tactical, theater and national (reconnaissance satellite) sensor data, including electro-optical and radar imagery and signals intelligence intercept reports. The Department of Defense has described the goal of DCGS as “all sensors and ground stations on a common network creating a shared information environment.”
Q: What areas or best-of-breed technologies are you working on for meeting for future needs of the government and military?
A: Going back to the data, we are focused on knowledge management techniques and solutions. It is all about the data. Our focus is bringing together multiple pieces of the data to automatically “learn” about new relationships that would not be obvious without our knowledge management techniques.
Q: Who are your customers?
A: Our customers include National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other classified customers, as well as GeoEye commercial ground station development and maintenance.
Q: What separates your company from others in your field?
A: We do not rely on one specific platform for our customers, but we are more platform-agnostic. We are not tied to a data platform, so for us it is not about the platform itself, but about the data. What we do is extract the maximum possible out of the data, and quickly and securely get that data and associated intelligence out to the user community.
Q: What unique advantages does your company offer to military customers?
A: What we uniquely offer to the military customers is domain knowledge across a wide variety of systems that we have been able to provide a common, distributed integration bus allowing for common tools and sharing of data across these different platforms.
Q: What projects are you working on for the future?
A: I mentioned knowledge management above, but a specific pursuit we are working is the e-Borders program for the U.K. Home Office that identifies travelers to or from the U.K., checks against threat databases prior to travel and records entry/exit from the country. ♦
