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  • NGA’s Technology Strategy

    The Vision of the Future

    Flexible, responsive, user-centered technology—delivered at the speed of mission—to truly “show the way” for those who depend on us

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  2. NGA’s Technology Strategy

Our Principles

Technology has been—and will continue to be—increasingly fundamental for NGA to achieve its strategic goals. We must look beyond reacting to circumstances and events and toward a model that anticipates and proactively provides technology to serve the heart of NGA’s mission. To achieve this mission, NGA’s enterprise will adopt principles to guide how we will enact the vision.

1. Deepen Understanding of
Mission Customers
2. Deliver with Velocity;
Adapt to Reality
3. Enable Technology
Through Partnership
4. Meet Future Mission
with Future Technology
5. Empower Workforce
with Tech & Training

The Way Ahead

To deliver on this strategy, NGA will pursue five key initiatives focused on addressing the needs of mission today and grounded in industry-leading practices. These key initiatives will empower people, improve processes, and leverage industry-leading technology.

Graphic repeating the Five Initiatives

Key Initiative Details

  • Empower Builders & Makers
    Problem Statement

    NGA applications are too difficult to build and update as mission needs change, and NGA’s technology leaders rarely have full transparency or authority over the applications in use across the Agency. This approach to application development and management spreads resources thin and starves the builders and makers of the tools they need to deliver products at the speed of mission.

    Recommendations
    1. Develop implementation guidance for NGA based on private sector best practices and internal software development experience gained over the past few years;
    2. Add APIs to legacy applications to enable consistent integration patterns and easier interactions with other systems;
    3. Adopt a service-centric architecture as the prevailing framework for how most NGA applications will be designed. NGA will focus on spreading these three concepts as consistently and widely as possible throughout the enterprise; and
    4. Implement, document, and broadly adopt reusable application platforms
    Objective

    An ecosystem that provides modern development tools, facilitates compliance with security standards, and streamlines processes for implementation on all security domains. A development and deployment platform to support modern DevSecOps practices and API-first development.

    Chart demonstrating the transition from Legacy NGA Apps to Modern NGA apps

    Value to NGA

    NGA’s pivot to a more consistent DevSecOps experience for builders and makers will significantly improve its ability to design, develop, and deliver applications that support current and future GEOINT capabilities.

  • Build with Customers
    Problem Statement

    NGA has focused historically on tool acquisition to fill capability gaps. Much of this tool acquisition has occurred without central oversight or consistent, direct user input and has resulted in both shadow IT and a lack of full lifecycle planning, increasing the burden on both resources and infrastructure.

    Recommendations
    1. Work across the NSG to understand the wide variety of customer needs to develop a common product vision, strategy, and objectives;
    2. Understand the current existing capabilities within NGA and develop product lines;
    3. Prepare the cultural and organizational shifts required to hire and empower product managers, designers, and user experience professionals; and
    4. Grow the community of NGA employees delivering products focused on user needs to increase transparency and trust among the workforce and NGA customers
    Objective

    Focus on meeting mission customer needs and empowering product managers and user experience professionals. Employ product management to modernize offerings and capabilities with a common vision, strategy, and objectives. Build and iterate on products customers love and that meet their evolving needs.

    Chart demonstrating the transition from program characteristics to project characteristics

    Value to NGA

    Products will be continuously iterated on by development teams that are as close to the user as possible. Lastly, improved UX design will provide critical user-centric capabilities to ensure maximum adoption of new products.

  • Transform Digital Workspaces
    Problem Statement

    The desktop continues to be the primary technology for NGA’s workforce and plays a significant role in the overall digital experience. The current decentralized approach to maintaining and refreshing workstations creates operational challenges in planning, maintaining, and investing in a desktop strategy that provides consistent and scalable ways to improve the workforce’s digital experience.

    Recommendations
    1. Provide personalized desktop services for multiple enterprise persona types;
    2. Refine refresh processes to incorporate new industry offerings at a faster pace;
    3. Enforce governance mechanisms; and
    4. Allow the self-service installation of approved, common software packages
    Objective

    Modernize desktop services and experience to provide proactive technology services for boosting productivity and workforce satisfaction.

    Graphic demonstrating the transformation of digital workspaces

    Value to NGA

    NGA’s pivot to more capable workforce tools will result in greater workforce productivity and help to accelerate improved engagement with NGA customers. These tools can be a force multiplier for accomplishing mission goals.

  • Bring AI, Cloud & HPC into GEOINT Mainstream
    Problem Statement

    Despite pockets of progress and well-intentioned planning efforts, NGA has struggled to make a coordinated and purposeful migration to the cloud. Additionally, NGA technologies involving AI and HPC are deployed in silos with limited coordination across the enterprise.

    Recommendations
    1. Develop use cases and a governance body that drives the selection of which compute environment is suitable for specific workloads and tasks
    2. Iterate upon the existing NGA Hybrid Cloud Strategy to ensure it considers multi-cloud, edge, and on-premise offerings and capabilities
    3. Select compute location for applications by mission need, with a priority to leverage cloud capabilities
    4. Baseline AI use cases for automation and augmentation with a focus on both mission and business process enablement.
    5. Select edge products and technologies that focus on key challenges.
    Objective

    Establish enterprise-wide access to modern HPC and cloud offerings to handle data that support automation, augmentation, and AI initiatives.

    Value to NGA

    The future of GEOINT requires robust offerings and coordination across infrastructure, applications, and data teams. If NGA can execute a holistic strategy to embrace hybrid cloud, integrate the edge, and improve its HPC access, it will be in a prime position to meet future GEOINT technology requirements.

  • Treat Data as a Strategic Asset
    Problem Statement

    Presently, NGA has gaps in awareness of its information assets, where these assets are located, and how they should be disseminated, leading to information-sharing challenges both within NGA Directorates and outside NGA with its customers.

    Recommendations
    1. Identify and catalog the data NGA has today, as well as the data required to meet NGA’s mission-critical priorities and use cases
    2. Grow data-driven workforce by supporting activities such as creating a data-literacy baseline for new contributors across the Agency, training individuals to increase their data knowledge and skills, employing real-time decision automation, etc.
    3. Identify infrastructure modifications needed to support increased usage of data and required new tradecraft and technologies, including considerations for data security
    4. Identify and implement technology proofs of concept to support data governance initiatives
    5. Create a master data management (MDM) program to support mission-critical priorities products and services
    Objective

    Data is a strategic asset with enhanced and enforced data governance for discovery, curation, and use in mission and operational systems. Analytics and reporting capabilities are also improved.

    Graphic demonstrating data as a strategic asset.

    Value to NGA

    A holistic approach to improving data-centric capabilities will accelerate NGA's ability to harness data across the NSG to support the exploitation and evolution of GEOINT. NGA will also empower data stewards across the enterprise to leverage technology and facilitate automation and augmentation efforts where appropriate.

View the CTO's Technology Strategy Brochure

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Contact Us

We have offices that can help with some specific opportunities to work with NGA. For more information, please feel free to reach out to any of the following:

Small Business Office

You must complete a SAM Small Business Profile for Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS) at
https://web.sba.gov/pro-net/search/dsp_dsbs.cfm
before reaching out to NGA.

If you need specific assistance on an existing contract, contact
smallbusiness@nga.mil.

NGA Industry Engagement

If you are interested in providing a demo of your capability, contact
IndustryEngagement@nga.mil.

NGA Research

For outreach regarding GEOINT research opportunities, please contact NGA Research at
nga_research@nga.mil.

Warfighter Support

For Tactical Edge GEOINT solutions, please contact us at
NGA-WarfighterSupport@nga.mil.