Home for the Future
Written by Harrison Donnelly
GIF 2011 Volume 9: Issue: 8 (November/December)
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has completed its transition to a consolidated new headquarters facility that brings employees together for better collaboration and equips them with the latest in technology and building design.
NGA Campus East (NCE), formally opened in a ceremony this fall, is located on Fort Belvoir North Area in Springfield, Va. Authorized by the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Act, NCE marks the consolidation of NGA’s major East Coast operations and facilities formerly located throughout the National Capital Region.
The NCE facility was specifically designed to enhance mission performance, facilitate physical and virtual collaboration, and promote greater information sharing within the agency and across the intelligence community and Department of Defense.
The facility was designed for 8,500 NGA employees—government civilians, military members and contractors—who moved into the facility from January to September 2011. NCE provides a secure and modern working environment to improve product delivery through improved collaborative interaction and communication among NGA’s employees.
Indeed, the facility was designed specifically to improve the collaborative nature of NGA’s work, explained Tom Bukoski, an NGA official who served as manager for design and construction. “The IC has long been pushing to be more open, collaborative and interactive, so we designed the workspaces to allow that. We have about 83 percent of our employees are in open office architectures, which means cubicles. It’s standard in most offices, but it allows people to see each other, talk about what they are doing and coordinate their work.
“In addition, we’ve designed a number of places where people can meet and be together. We have large groupings of work areas, which we call ‘neighborhoods,’ as well as ‘cafes’ along an interior corridor that flanks our atrium space. People can have lunch and coffee and see others on a non-work basis, which we believe carries over into the work environment,” Bukoski added.
The facility’s advanced IT infrastructure, meanwhile, supports current and future technologies, including cloud computing and virtual user profiles.
“In most older facilities, networks and systems were built on a piecemeal basis, so it was hard to understand where all the cables were going. Here, we have been very deliberate about the placement of servers and telephone rooms, so our plant is much more concise,” said Bukoski.
“We were able to build our technology center to a standard of 150 watts per square foot for a technical load, and 150 watts for cooling,” he continued. “So it’s a very robust facility, and because we were able to build it so robust, we’ve been able to consolidate the data storage activities we had at various sites into a much more compact configuration. We thought we would need two floors in our tech center to handle all of our equipment, but we’ve been able to do it in one floor.”
By consolidating an estimated 250 network systems into about 180, Bukoski added, planners were able to streamline technology operations and make them more efficient and understandable. ♦
