Keeping Score

To National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) last year announced a joint environment that was the subject of a 30-minute presentation Tuesday on GEOINT 2017’s Government Pavilion Stage. Called the Commercial GEOINT Activity (CGA), its goal is to generate more transparency around government needs and industry capabilities so the Intelligence Community and commercial partners can collaborate more effectively on opportunities of mutual interest.

“The Commercial GEOINT Activity was established … by the directors of both of our agencies, who were of common mind that we really needed to work together to take full advantage of the emerging forms of commercial GEOINT that are coming,” said Michael Foster, NGA’s CGA director. Foster co-presented a session titled “Understanding the Commercial GEOINT Activity” with NRO CGA Director Peter Muend.

Together, Foster and Muend unveiled the CGA Leaderboard, a new web platform accessible via the GEOINT Solutions Marketplace. The Leaderboard will serve as a digital scoreboard that articulates joint NGA/NRO needs and allows prospective industry partners to score their solutions against those needs as a means of gathering instantaneous feedback about their business prospects.

“Once you put your capabilities in across any number of categories, you’ll be able to see immediately, ‘I’m ideally suited for this sort of use case, but on the other hand I’m not so applicable to this use case over here,’ and then you can make strategic business decisions based on that,” Muend said. “On our side, it’s a fantastic market research tool, because as all of you provide your capabilities to us … we’ll figure out new use cases that we’ll want to put on the system.”