Planners at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say a new expertise-exchange program with industry will bring novels ideas and fresh energy into the agency.
"We need to understand our customers outside of NGA and outside of the government. Industry operates in a different way," said Elizabeth Hoag, eNGAge program manager.
Under the eNGAge program, leaders from within the agency will go out on loan to work in industry for periods of six months to a year. The program also invites industry and academic partners to send their experts to work inside NGA for stints of up to five years.
With initial assignments presently being negotiated, NGA says it could have a dozen people out on assignment by the fall.
NGA Director Robert Cardillo announced the program in May at the annual GEOINT Symposium. "[W]e plan to leave our desks, and engage partners where they are," he said, noting that the program "will offer our people immersive experiences with industry and academia — and will also allow us to welcome outside talent into NGA."
Through eNGAge, the agency plans to send middle management and senior executive levels to locations across the country, and will pay the salaries of those employees while they serve in their industry or academia assignments, Hoag said. Candidates may be senior subject matter experts, senior intelligence leaders or others from within the managerial ranks.
Hoag said the program likely will include between 25 and 50 NGA employees at any given time and that participation will be selective. "We are not going to have enough opportunities for everybody to be going out at once, so we are going to take a lot of care to make sure we are matching the right person to the right opportunity," she said.
Candidates coming from industry to NGA postings likewise will be carefully vetted, and will be required to have security clearance, Hoag said.
NGA is looking for the program to generate more than just a free flow of cutting-edge technological ideas.
"It's about the technological innovations, but it also is about rethinking how you create content, how you create more value in contextual services," said Mike Geggus, NGA's industry innovation advocate.
"Most importantly, it is about the cultural changes, the business changes that government is struggling with right now. We want to look at ideas like lean startup, and how companies are using tools like that to manage extreme uncertainty in order to sustain their business," he said. "Can we adopt that in government? How can we learn to do those things?"
Along those lines, NGA will be looking to forge potential exchanges with nontraditional partners, companies outside the usual geospacial realm. Venture capital consultants, for example, could offer insights into improving business processes, while big data analytics companies could shed new light on the way information is compiled and presented.
At the same time NGA employees are out serving in industry positions, the agency will be looking to bring on board temporary executives from the commercial world in the hopes that they will be able to directly share their insights.
"It's the opportunity to see the innovation right here, to have someone sitting in our spaces with our teams saying, 'Hey, let's look at it a different way,' " Hoag said. "We are hoping it will help us develop alternative ways of thinking about a problem and maybe getting to a better solution or a faster solution."
The program should be a budget wash, with NGA and its partners paying the salaries for their respective employees, although the agency might pick up expenses such as travel for visiting executives.
"We do have a little bit of flexibility," Hoag said.
