IN CONVERSATION
'People First, Mission Always' Our first and foremost investment focuses on people. We say ‘People First, Mission Always’, because if you take care of people first, then the rest is easy, says Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). BY Sanjay Kumar & John Kedar. NGA’s Strategy 2025 is aimed at keeping the Agency at the forefront of geospatial intelligence. What are your key areas of focus at this point?
We released our Strategy 2025 at GEOINT 2019 in San Antonio. It has four strategic goals — people, partnerships, mission today and mission tomorrow. Our first and foremost investment focuses on people. There is a great saying that in the special operations community, ‘humans are more important than hardware’. Eventually you get around to technology but one must not forget who creates that technology. I have worked at a lot of places that believe in ‘Mission First, People Always’. We have reversed that here; we say, ‘People First, Mission Always’, because if you take care of people first, then the rest is easy. Our second objective is to invest in partnerships. When we talk about our partnerships, the fact is that we have friends who are really good. Defining our partnerships, our network of friends is largely dependent on our imagination and our willingness to go out and create meaningful connections. This network also allows us to be aware of how to get the best from technology. Often in the government we think that the industry wants something from us, but I also think that often industry wants to help. So do people in academia and the community. If we can build strong relationships with them, then we are around 16 | www.gwprime.geospatialworld.net | March-April 2021
the technology. I think it is much more impactful than trying to do everything ourselves. The Covid pandemic made things challenging. The GEOINT symposium was cancelled, several meetings were called off, but we didn’t cancel our commitment to strengthen partnerships, and keeping the people connected. During this period, we came out with technology focus areas to enable stronger partnerships between NGA, industry, academia, and other government and community partners around emerging geospatial technologies. Even though there wasn’t a symposium, we published it anyway. It’s available on our website, www.nga.mil. Everybody wants to win, and we are convinced that the best way for us to do so is by investing in our people, strengthening our partnerships, and using the best technology. We are not going to know what that technology is unless we make our needs known and open ourselves up to brilliant people.
You mentioned the technology focus areas, partnerships and brilliant people. How are you using your new building in St. Louis to gain the greatest benefit from these for NGA and the city? We are pressing forward with our new construction in St. Louis. We have envisioned a future where we have more agility in how we do our business across
