The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency released its second annual Tech Focus Areas, highlighting top problem areas the agency wants to address using technology in the coming year.
While NGA published a similar list in 2019, this years authors note the world has changed significantly.
The year 2020 will represent a historic inflection point for our agency, our community, and our nation. In addition to the challenges we currently face from the COVID-19 pandemic, great power competition has reemerged as another challenge to U.S. prosperity and security, the document states.
The nature of geospatial-intelligence, or GEOINT, has changed significantly as well. In the past, the U.S. government was the undisputed leader in global surveillance.
Today, with commercial GEOINT available worldwide, we face a much more level playing field, the document states.
Several near-peer adversaries are investing significantly in new technologies to close the gap with U.S. and allied capabilities, NGA Chief Technology Officer Mark Munsell wrote in an introductory note. To stay ahead of these adversaries, we must bring together our world-class experts at NGA, industry partners with exquisite domain expertise and technical capabilities, and companies who have never worked with government before but whose products could help advance NGAs mission.
As such, Munsell said the document was designed to focus on areas of need, rather than specific technologies. While the document does not address specific technological solutions, it is explicitin broad termsabout the kinds of technologies NGA wants to explore.
In order to maintain leadership in this realm, NGA plans to foster partnerships with other agencies, industry and academia.
The tech focus areas arent shelfwarewe are identifying opportunities to leverage non-traditional acquisition capabilities to address the needs outlined in this document, Christy Monaco, NGA chief ventures officer, said in a release Wednesday.
The extensive list of needs includes things like analyzing immense data sets to provide useful models; managing and integrating data from diverse sources; improving the software development pipeline; taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing; and preparing the agency for the future of work, including managing a distributed workforce.
The document condenses all this into five focus areas, each with several subsections explaining the agencys needs. From the document:
Advanced Analytics and Modeling
Data Management
Modern Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Future of Work
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NGA Knows Its Challenges, Now It Needs the Tech to Address Them - Nextgov
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