GEOINT Your Way
NGA DISSEMINATION INITIATIVES SEEK TO PROVIDE GEOSPATIAL PRODUCTS MORE QUICKLY AND IN THE FORMATS THAT CUSTOMERS REQUIRE.
Even as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) begins providing increasingly accurate GEOINT products through the recently launched NextView high-resolution imagery generating program, the agency is also working to respond to another requirement—delivering its products sooner.
NGA’s evolving Transforming the Dissemination Environment (TDE) initiative, together with the recently awarded Demand- Based Geospatial-Intelligence (DBGI) pilot project contract, are the initial vehicles that will reduce the time warfighters in the field and other agency customers receive up-to-date, relevant and detailed GEOINT.
Early results from TDE provide a compelling reason for NGA to continue transforming the way it delivers products to its customers, agency officials contend.
TDE is an internal NGA initiative and level-of-effort that was begun earlier this decade in response to a confluence of events and processes. Those dynamics included conforming to Y2K protocols, responding to the events of September 11, 2001, and harnessing the breathtaking expansion of the Internet.
While TDE is allowing NGA to migrate from hard-copy (analog) to digital products, it was not initiated to eliminate paper-based maps, charts and similar media in the short-term. Rather, as the initiative reduces or eliminates centralized hardcopy and media production, it also improves distribution flexibility for data— both electronic and remaining hard-copy versions.
Like other efforts to transform vestiges of the Cold War-era defense and intelligence programs and system, TDE is expected to be an agent of change within the organization well into the future. “We initially said our customers are starting to go digital in various phases, and some will go digital much more quickly than others. So we probably will be very busy over the next 10 to 15 years as we convert from hard-copy to soft-copy and transform,” said Jim Kwolek, director, information management, NGA Enterprise Operations.
There has been significant early progress on the road to transforming this aspect of NGA’s operations, developers say. The TDE team assessed and pared down its product holdings, gained International Standards Organization certification for its processes, and charted a course that merges these processes and ensures they will yield electronic-formatted products.
NGA customers want their electronic data much like those at a fast-food restaurant want their sandwiches—“now and their way,” Kwolek observed, adding, “This is really a challenge after a centralized model that provides a product in one standard way.”
SWEET SPOTS
TDE is making this quantum-leap forward with the recently launched DBGI pilot project. DBGI will address how NGA users will see maps, charts and other data, and how they are going to interact with the data, and determine what type of output mechanism, such as a screen, a screen and printer, or some other solution, they need, Kwolek explained.
The DBGI pilot program is also “helping us understand the users’ environment, what they have to deal with, what we have to do to hit those marks, and try to find the ‘sweet spot’ between an old, centralized model and a new, decentralized model— and there are some sweet spots in there from a business sense. That’s how we will reprogram our budget and complete other actions,” he added.
An initial one-year DBGI contract valued at $1.7 million was awarded in September to an industry team headed by Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services.
One Network Enterprises is the project’s second vendor. “We manage the complexity of business processes and transactions that spread across multiple organizations—those organizations are either an internal department, or could be external suppliers and customers in a supply chain,” remarked John Keenan, chief executive officer. The company’s portfolio includes projects with the physical supply chain and contracts with the Department of Defense.
If NGA determines sufficient value was delivered from this pilot project and the decision is made to continue DBGI beyond this phase, there is the potential for the program to have as much as $20 million in supported work over five and perhaps more years.
As with most pilot projects, DBGI will use a limited number of products and supporting systems. “This will not encompass all the products that NGA provides or produces, but just a small portion of those, to see how that works,” clarified Kwolek.
One opportunity for technology growth will occur as the pilot project migrates from NGA’s current standard of producing hardcopy charts and maps using large-format, five-color lithographic presses. This triedand- true process provides specific spot colors to support warfighters and other users of NGA products in the poor lighting conditions of an operations center onboard an aircraft carrier at sea, a land-based joint operation center or other venue.
NGA will collaborate with one or more vendors during the pilot project to obtain special ink cartridges and other material to provide the best method to “implement the digital, wide-format, high-volume, hardcopy output solution,” according to the DBGI unclassified statement of work published in August. One expected deliverable from the industry team is the ability of the vendor’s plotter to accept and print all standard file formats, accept cyan, magenta, yellow and black PDFs, and utilize Print Industry Standard Raster Image Processing files.
SUPPLY CHAIN
Logistics is another area of interest in the pilot project. The Supply-Chain Management (SCM) portion of the DBGI pilot project is a demand-driven process that, in this program, will deliver data to the NGA customer when required. This is not the case today, observed Mark Whitney, project manager, DBGI pilot, Remote Replication Site (RRS) Arnold, Mo.
“Currently, we do big press runs and some of that data in the form of maps and charts are sent directly to the customer. The majority of the data go to the Defense Logistics Agency, where they sit and wait to be requested,” Whitney said.
One of the DBGI’s envisioned logistics outcomes would move individual files to NGA-Arnold and other RRSs around the globe, and pre-stage them. The customer at each site would be able to select data in either hard-copy or electronic format. “By having that data on-the-shelf and located closer to the customer, he has the option of getting it in either format,” remarked Whitney.
The DBGI pilot project enlists RRSs at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Arnold from among the 13 worldwide sites. “Ultimately, as we expand the DBGI program to the other RRSs, each of those would have a SCM node as part of the concept,” said Whitney.
Ultimately, one of the ways in which organizations gauge their success is through the efficiencies that are wrung from transforming their processes. NGA’s initial lessons-learned have provided encouragement to the organization to move TDE forward.
The potential return on investment that might be realized from a mature TDE environment can be seen in the fact that an NGA customer recent received an electronic file in one hour and 45 minutes. A similar paper product would previously have been provided in anywhere from three days to two weeks.
“One of our customers was looking for a digital file of a chart. They called back here to Arnold and we located the chart at the Bethesda RSS site. The chart was scanned-in, sent to Arnold and then onto another RSS site where our customer was located,” recalled Whitney. “In an earlier era, we would have had to find it, print it and ship it. So an hour and 45 minutes is spectacular.”
Advocates see further efficiencies ahead as NGA electronic data holdings increase and their supporting processes evolve, to where data may be moved from a DBGI site or RSS to customers in seconds.
USER-DEFINED REQUIREMENTS
The DBGI vendors will complete four distinct phases of the pilot project in 12 months—design, acquisition and accreditation, implementation, and a final report with accompanying lessons learned. Three waypoints are on the industry team’s path through September 2008 to achieve the government customer’s requirements.
At the top of its list is developing a new operational concept for allowing users to define their own requirements for geospatial intelligence products. “Some users want large printed maps delivered as hard copy through a commercial shipping company,” observed Cal Astrin, DBGI program manager, Lockheed Martin.
Other customers, however, want digital format data made available over the Web that they can print themselves. “We’re working to put in place the right business processes to make sure that NGA’s delivery enterprise is equipped to rapidly and efficiently meet the needs of all of their end users,” he added.
The vendors will also create a technology solution that enables that new operational concept. “Working with our partners in the commercial logistics and supply chain industry, we’re putting in place a new system that will automatically receive, process and execute orders from end users around the world. Users will access the system through the NGA portal, and can search and request for data from a variety of GEOINT applications,” pointed out Astrin.
The resultant whole system will conform with the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) model, meaning it will “plug and play” with other service-oriented architecture systems from joint and interagency organizations.
The vendors will also run a resultsfocused pilot program that will help determine the best possible way to expand and improve this program in the future. “This pilot will help us gather user feedback, collect metrics on the system’s effectiveness and implement a strong expanded solution as time goes on,” concluded Astrin.
Keenan of One Network Enterprises offered a second industry perspective. “In the case of this particular partnership with Lockheed Martin, it is actually on the information side—the movement of maps. It is a different type of good, an information good, versus a physical good, but it has exactly the same technology management challenges. Where is this product, called a map, who should have access to it based on roles, security and permissibility, and how am I going to move it to them, either electronically or through the physical printing of the map? So, we are the behind-the-scenes engine that is managing that process,” he said.
METADATA GENERATION
Beyond this pilot project’s technical milestones, other business opportunities loom large on TDE’s horizon. One enabling technology would generate metadata.
“I would love for the industry to help us start generating metadata, instead of someone doing something and then filling out a form,” said Kwolek. Under this concept, every time a product was generated on a workstation, that machine would also generate accompanying metadata that might include the analyst’s name, production date, the software used, the age of the imagery integrated into the product, and other information.
“This would be huge time savings for us. Every minute we spend filling out a metadata form we lose in our analytical world, which is what we are supposed to do for a living,” added Kwolek.
Metadata tagged to an NGA user would also eliminate concerns about accuracy with each entry. “Every person typing in this metadata by hand has an opportunity to make a mistake, by transposing a coordinate, typing a misspelled word or making another error,” Whitney noted.
The evolution of Web usage and other Internet innovations included in the development of Webs 2.0 and 3.0 will provide the NGA-industry team with ample opportunities to develop Web-generated metadata and other process improvements beyond the initial pilot project, participants predict. ♦
