NGA - Adapting to the Future of Work
As one of more than 500 attendees at the recent U.S Geospatial Intelligence Foundation GEOConnect event focused on the “Future of Work”, held virtually on July 22, I was excited to see how the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has once again risen to the challenge of the ongoing pandemic to meet the needs of its mission, workforce and the nation.
It is clear from the forum that NGA has seized the moment to accelerate change, embracing new and innovative ways to execute their missions while caring for their workforce and moving the agency forward.
The Future of Work is one of NGA’s five key areas of Tech Focus, along with advanced analytics and modeling; data management; modern software engineering; and artificial intelligence. As Accenture’s Kristen Vaughan introduced the panel of NGA leaders, she described the workforce of the future as connected, collaborative, mobile, able to access information anytime, anywhere, and blended – with humans and machines working together to make better decisions.
In the thoughtful discussion that followed, NGA Seniors wove these strands together, sharing their thoughts on how analytics, data, modern engineering, cyber security and artificial intelligence are combining to support new ways of working, now and in the future. NGA’s CTO Mark Munsell, CIO Mark Andress, CISO Matt Conner, Director, HR Kimberly Thompson, and NGA Campus West Program Director Susan Pollmann described how NGA’s embrace of innovation, virtual collaboration, mobility, and cyber security are changing the way NGA’s global workforce accomplishes it missions.
Having long led the Intelligence Community in the drive to the “open,” NGA has been exploring new ways to produce and deliver both classified and unclassified products from remote and mobile users for some time. With the arrival of COVID-19, and the requirement to reduce the density of its facilities by 75% to protect the health of its workforce, NGA was better positioned than most to adapt. The Agency’s experience in transitioning workloads to unclassified work environments allowed it to quickly bring some of these “drive to the open” initiatives to scale, in a manner that will forever change the way NGA accomplishes it mission.
“Keep Moving Forward”
While its most sensitive missions remained on premise, work forces and work streams that could safely migrate to unclassified environments did so, preserving space in the Agency’s facilities for classified support operations while allowing many other functions to be accomplished from home. In a manner of weeks, NGA went from supporting hundreds to thousands of remote users, doing what was necessary to reposition and secure a wide range of key processes – including substantive mission-support – to unclassified environments that kept their work force engaged. In embracing new ways to meet its mission requirements, NGA rose to the challenge of NGA Director Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, who charged his workforce in early March to “keep moving forward.”
Key to the agency’s success were their efforts to keep the workforce informed and engaged. By deliberately shifting the Agency’s operational and administrative updates from classified to secure but unclassified networks, the NGA team remained connected, focused on the mission, and supportive of one another.
“We are fundamentally changing, and we are excited about it”
As one Senior stated, “We are proud of ourselves. Our people feel better connected today because of what we have put in place. Our CIO and CISO enabled this and our people created activities to ensure we remain connected.” Through these efforts, and the teamwork that ensured new users on NGA’s rapidly expanding unclassified enterprise were well supported, “we have seen what we can do, how we can work, and we are excited about the future.”
NGA’s success in these last few months has given all of us a sense of what the future will look like when the Agency opens its New Campus - West in St. Louis, a facility whose function and design are now being refined by the lessons learned in the current environment. This experience has allowed the workforce to better appreciate the power of collaborative and well connected workspaces and as one Senior described, “to have the peace of mind that the future we envision is coming together – technologically and with our workforce’s support.”
As a new board member of US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, I am looking forward to more conversations about what the future of work will be for the wider intelligence community including NGA in St. Louis, where Accenture Federal Services will be opening its newest Advanced Technology Center. This state-of-the-art innovation and delivery center will bring some 1,400 jobs to the city. Like its sister centers in San Antonio, Texas, Virginia, and New York—it will serve the specialized, mission-critical needs of U.S. federal agencies.
I am excited to see NGA leaning in to align its mission, workforce, and operating model to evolve and transform with the future of work and these changing times. I look forward to working across public and private sector partners to help NGA and the intelligence community make the future of work possible - in whatever form it may take. With AI, collaborative tools, and an ongoing commitment to security, NGA has shown how the federal government can and will be ready to meet whatever workforce challenges this “never normal” may bring.
The opinions, statements and assessments in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute legal advice, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of Accenture, its subsidiaries, or affiliates.
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