New Orleans-National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency director Letitia A. Long shared her new vision for the agency yesterday at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation GEOINT Symposium held at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
"I want to put the power of GEOINT directly in the hands of our users," said Long in her keynote address.
Long presented her vision-"Putting the Power of GEOINT in the Hands of the Users"-and established two main goals. First, fundamentally change the user experience by providing online, on-demand access to our GEOINT knowledge. Second, create new value by broadening and deepening analytic expertise by providing contextual analysis of places informed not only by the Earth’s physical features and imagery intelligence, but also by "human geography."
At the core of achieving the vision is a coherent set of online services that will provide integrated discovery of and access to all of NGA’s GEOINT content, services, human expertise and support through the Web storefront and "apps" customized to user needs.
"Our users need access to a wide variety of geospatial content as well as the ability to deal with our experts, and we want to make this a really easy process," said Long. "We see this as establishing a balance among self service, assisted-service and full-service interactions. We also recognize that we can only do this through a wide variety of partnerships."
NGA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a member of the national Intelligence Community. The agency’s mission is to provide geospatial intelligence, which is the exploitation of satellite or airborne images, fused with other intelligence and geospatial information like mapping, charting and geodesy, to help warfighters and national decision makers visualize what they need to know. NGA is the nation’s eyes.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., NGA also has major facilities in the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and St. Louis, Mo., areas with NGA support teams worldwide. Visit our Web site at www.nga.mil.