NGA Director Robert Cardillo outlined a new strategy and new methods of accomplishing it at GEOINT 2015 in Washington on Tuesday.  The key here is “new.”

“For decades intelligence was like a regulated currency,” Cardillo told an audience of 5,000 in the Walter Washington Convention Center. “We guarded it jealously. We controlled it tightly.”

That currency, he added, referring to a term introduced in a December 2014 Harvard Business Review article by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans, was “old power.”

Time now for “new power.”

“The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it,” Cardillo said.

That channeling requires a more open, transparent process in gathering and analyzing data, and more open use of the intelligence product. The NGA showed an example of that in its revelation of geographic and sociological data that helped the world cope with the recent Ebola crisis. To be open required the agency to work with lawyers to deal with licensing and other legal aspects of posting data on a public website.

The NGA’s new strategy requires a different look at its people, at the partners it is assembling in a “Team GEOINT,” with professional development and with increasing the agency’s value to its customers.

For more details of Cardillo’s new strategy, see:

Robert Cardillo - Keynote | GEOINT 2015 from Trajectory On Location on Vimeo.