NGA Driector reflects on GEOINT’s past, charts course for its future.
By Matt Alderton May 16, 2016
What do Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln have in common with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)? A lot, actually, according to NGA Director Robert Cardillo, who used the celebrated American leaders to illustrate the continued evolution of geospatial intelligence during his keynote address Monday morning at GEOINT 2016.
“Seventy-five years ago, the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial was dedicated in the Black Hills of South Dakota,” Cardillo said. “It was a phenomenal achievement of art and science resulting in an iconic memorial to four great Americans … So let’s use these four remarkable Americans as a framework to look at our progress.”
During his first address as director of NGA at the GEOINT 2015 Symposium, Cardillo introduced a new NGA Strategy focused on four distinct pillars: people, partners, profession, and value. Because he would have been an avid NGA customer, President Washington, Cardillo told the audience, personifies value.
“Enabling customer success is what compels [NGA] every day. We’re driven forward by our fear of failing them. They—you—are our reason for being,” Cardillo said, stressing the importance of NGA’s GEOINT Services initiative in creating customer value. GEOINT Services, the Intelligence Community’s enterprise-wide GEOINT delivery platform that spans all security domains, is on track to deliver geospatial content fully in the cloud by the end of 2017.
When it does, NGA will be even closer to achieving his vision of succeeding “in the open,” according to Cardillo.