A Customer-Centric NGA

Justin Poole of NGA’s Xperience Directorate provides program updates

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Nearly 100 individuals attended USGIF’s GEOINTeraction Tuesday event Sept. 8 to network and hear from Justin Poole, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) Xperience Directorate. Poole is responsible for enhancing the NGA customer experience through online, on-demand GEOINT services, and also serves as NGA’s customer service portfolio manager.

Poole kicked off his speech by defining his emphasis on “customer centricity”—a philosophy by which the agency strives to not only provide what customers ask for, but what they need to accomplish their mission.

“[NGA’s] Globe, Map of the World, IGAPP… those are just stuff,” Poole said. “It’s cool stuff and we’ve worked extremely hard on them, but at the end of the day we need to employ it in the manner that improves customer experience.”

The Globe, NGA’s new unified web presence featuring geospatial content, tools, and services provides context on global events and makes GEOINT more accessible for NGA customers. It features enterprise search, advanced storytelling via traditionally trained journalists, a map application program interface, an ecosystem navigation bar, and responsive mobile design.

“Experience for the customer is much improved with this type of thinking,” Poole said.

Poole went on to discuss NGA’s upcoming GEOINT Services model. Set to launch in 2016, the GEOINT Services platform allows GEOINT producers and consumers to exchange geospatial content and services and provides on-demand access to geospatial, sensor, geo-referencing, enrichment, and processing services. Poole said GEOINT Services would help bring more small businesses, niche companies, and academic partners into the NGA fold by starting the development process on the low side then moving capabilities to classified networks.

“[The platform will broaden] the spectrum on the choices we have before us,” Poole said. “By using a development and operations construct and bringing in relevant parties at the right time, we achieve what the customer is looking for sooner and with more relevance.”

Poole concluded with an update on NGA’s Innovative GEOINT Application Provider Program (IGAPP), which launched in May under a four-year contract with TASC. The program facilitates the delivery of applications to NGA’s GEOINT App Store with TASC acting as an app broker, lowering the barrier to entry and significantly speeding up the process for delivering new apps to agency customers. Poole said NGA has already approved more than 200 vendors and encouraged the audience to submit app proposals and partner with NGA to help the agency more fully embrace “mobile first.”

“[IGAPP] is an innovative, groundbreaking way to bring capability,” he said.

Posted in: Event Recaps   Tagged in: Applications, Intelligence, NGA

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