"Everything happens somewhere, space and time are the only way to integrate all data. Integration leads to understanding." (20 words).

The reality is more complex, or more powerful, depending on how you slice it. When I get deeper into conversations about how GIS supports Intelligence, I like to talk about it terms of the classic Intelligence Cycle.

GIS provides a framework and approach which closely mirrors this cycle. As technology improves and the threat evolves, the focus of the intelligence cycle shifts (link to Intel in 4th Age). As I think about GIS as part of the intelligence cycle, I like to think of it in 4 categories:

1. Planning and Collection

2. Production and Analysis

3. Integration and Dissemination

4. Intelligence Enterprise Integration

The first three categories are the Intelligence Cycle, of course, but they are combined because, from a GIS perspective, the lines a little bit blurry. Category 4 addresses the need for the geospatial component of intelligence to be integrated into a large intelligence enterprise. Without integration, GIS has a danger of being a silo, only supporting GEOINT. The real value in GIS comes from extending to all intelligence disciplines and using it to connect intelligence analysis to decision making. I will dive deep into these categories in future posts, and I will give a quick overview of each here.

Planning and Collection

GIS underpins planning and collection because it helps us understand collection requirements. Maps help us understand the current and planned disposition of assets. For space-based collection, GIS helps link the space assets to what is happening on the ground. As intelligence is collected, GIS provides a framework for integrating, which crosses the sources of collection using the common framework of geography. These sources might be Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT), Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), or Measurement and Signatures Intelligence (MASINT). Each of these collection disciplines requires special skills and understanding of skilled analysts, who can leverage GIS as part of their tradecraft. GEOINT is clearly heavily invested in GIS, but the use of GIS is not the sole domain of GEOINT experts. 

Production and Analysis

Intelligence Production and Analysis is fundamentally about integrating data, developing an understanding of threats, and predicting possible outcomes. I generally group production and analysis into categories based on the nature of the target or critical question. When starting an analytic task, you often know something about the target. Either the signature of the target or the target's location. Your approach is based on what you know or what is unknown. In all cases, GIS is being used to integrate data and perform analytics based on time and location. 

GIS-based Production and Analysis integrates into these standard intelligence products:

• Indications and Warnings

• Current Intelligence

• General Military Intelligence

• Target Intelligence

• Scientific and Technical Intelligence

• Counter-Intelligence

• Estimative Intelligence

• Intelligence Preparation of the Environment

Integration and Dissemination

Analysts, teams, and organizations can collaborate on integrated intelligence products using GIS. And, decision-makers can integrate the latest intelligence into their decision-making cycles using dynamic services. A GIS supports a collaborative model for the sharing of analytic products as well as raw information. Groups and teams can collaborate and share information in real-time. This collaboration can be distributed across multiple organizations and even taken into the field for disconnected operations. 

The integration and dissemination phase is fundamentally about connecting to external organizations, and individuals to support their requirements. A GIS helps in the following areas:

• Communicating the Analysis

• Support for Policy Making

• Support for Situational Awareness

• Support for Planning

All of these workflows support Cross-Functional Collaboration. Intelligence analysts organize by geography, topic, or area of specialty. As a collaboration framework, ArcGIS enables cross-organizational collaboration to bring together key intelligence from multiple agencies allowing teams to create and share information products. To develop integrated intelligence and decision-making products, they need to be able to collaborate in their teams and across organizational boundaries.

Intelligence Enterprise Integration

Intelligence Enterprises are inherently heterogeneous and continuously evolving systems. GIS must be designed to integrate into large enterprise systems. GIS incorporates standard best practices for deployment, management, and configuration of enterprise geospatial services. GIS applications are deployed in web browsers, on desktops, and in modern mobile devices. GIS software needs to be supported with full product lifecycle support. GIS support teams need to be able to work in secure environments and provide round the clock support for critical systems. GIS needs to support licensing for an entire enterprise, allowing organizations to scale their adoption as needed using simple acquisition processes.

The integration into Enterprise systems requires nine key areas to be addressed:

1. Openness and Interoperability

2. Security and Identity

3. Agile IT and Enterprise SecDevOps support

4. Cloud-Ready

5. Disconnected, Intermittent and Limited-Band Width Operations

6. Enterprise Software and Support

7. Product Lifecycle Management

8. Support and Services

9. Education and Training

If you want to learn more about the specific products and technology we produce at Esri to support these workflows, you can visit our website esri.com/intelligence

If you are new to this work, I owe a lot of the thinking to several others. I give them credit here. Additionally, if you are curious about my approach to writing an unclassified blog on GIS and Intelligence, you can read more about my methods here

Now, I see a real shift in the demands of a Military Installation. Many installations are still using GIS for the same purposes as before, and creating more efficient techniques for those same workflows. However, the more interesting trend is coming from other parts of the installation. Installation commanders, public work officials, military police, are all wanting to use GIS. They see their counterparts in their neighboring communities use GIS to improve efficiency, make data-driven decisions and improve the quality of life in their communities. At Esri, we call this a Smart Community. 

Military Installations have many of the same challenges as a smart community. They also have some unique challenges they need to:

•Complying with Government Regulations and Directives

•Maintaining an Accurate Picture of All Assets

•Improve energy efficiency and resiliency

They want to become a Smart Installation. 

What is a Smart Installation? A smart installation is one that is prepared for the future in some different ways.  They manage their assets in real time. They coordinate projects across departments; they make date driven decisions. Most importantly, they are transparent in all of their activities across the installation and levels of command. 

The term Smart Installations is an umbrella term for several objectives. Under that heading of smart installations are sub-themes such as sustainable installations, safe installations, resilient installations, smart facilities, and so on.  The goal is to deliver improved services and making the installation a place that functions efficiently while contributing to the overall readiness of the organization.

For example, a Smart Installation is able to understand the impact on their installation from a power outage. They know which facilities are affected . They understand how that facility impacts the mission of the organization. They know if  that facility is serving a mission critical role for the organization and how to mitigate the impact of the outage. 

An installation doesn't just become Smart; they need to have a strategy for becoming smart. Most installations already have GIS technology but is is not being used across the installation. A location strategy is needed to help prioritize and develop new capabilities to location enable the operations of the installation. 

I recently did a webinar on this topic with GovLoop that goes into more detail and shows some examples of leveraging IoT connected devices to improve the operations on an installation. 

http://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1321886/07E1E8BCF3D37E90081F9399D49EB8CC 

In 2017, I plan to do more work with installations. My goal is to develop a location strategy that is specific to a government installation. I think the ideas from Smart Communities can help me get started but I will need to find some partners to help me address the unique needs of a military installation.  If you want to help, just drop me a line bconklin@esri.com. 

In many ways, Activity Based Intelligence is not a new concept. ABI borrows heavily from techniques used for years by All-Source Intelligence Analysts and GEOINT professionals. What is important about ABI is that we now have a set of best practices for applying geographic thinking to the complex intelligence problems we encounter today. ABI helps to discover the unknown-unknowns and can drive us to better answers using other traditional intelligence methods. 

ABI is different. It is a shift away from focused "target" intelligence and into a new mode where activity and its underlying context is the central theme. 

ABI's foundation is four pillars, these are the key tenants of ABI and represent a different approach than traditional intelligence methods. 

• Georeference to Discover

• Data Neutrality

• Sequence Neutrality

• Integration before Exploitation

Georeference to Discover

Speaking as a GIS guy, this is the most important and seemingly obvious concept. You need to georeference all of your data before you exploit it. You need to correlate the data in time and space to discover key trends and patterns. Location and time are common elements to all activity. This single act will begin to structure your data and prepare it for a variety of different analytic workflows. 

Data Neutrality

This second principle is that all data regardless of source is valuable. The primary purpose of this principle is to overcome the traditional bias of prizing classified intelligence over open source intelligence (OSINT). With so many new sources of location-enabled data shared on the internet, you just can not ignore its potential intelligence value. 

Sequence Neutrality

This third pillar of ABI involves the nature of time. Many analysts partition their data based time, either the time the data was received/collected or the reporting time. The big challenge for ABI is that all the information needs to be stored together regardless of period. For example, you can't put your data into bins by month. Instead, you need to be able to analyze data across time boundaries. You also need to understand that some reporting will come in much later than the event, and you can not ignore it. 

Integration Before Exploitation

The final pillar of ABI is Integration before exploitation. This pillar emphasizes the need for a Multi-Int approach to all intelligence problems. Incidents that are insignificant in one source may become significant when combined with other intelligence information. Integrate early and correlate the data so you can get the full picture. This pillar has driven the creation of Multi-Int teams so single-source specialists can work alongside all-source analysts to before actual Multi-Int analysis. 

The applications of these four pillars can seem obvious. The challenges come in implementing organizational changes and process to support these workflows. Technology transformation is helping. The dawn of big data is making it possible to store large volumes of intelligence data in a format that it can be analyzed and exploited. New analysis tools are making it possible to visualize and interrogate the data without having to partition it in advance. Technologies are allowing for real-time analysis and data correlation, freeing the analyst to focus on the hard analytic problems. More information is becoming available to add context to the intelligence being collected and analyzed. 

In future posts, I will explore these technology advancements. I will explain how GIS technology is evolving to support these complex workflows. As a GIS professional working in the Intelligence Community, it is important that we understand ABI. Applications of Geographic thinking are happening in a much broader way, and we need to add our expertise to help solve these tough problems. 

First, Bill discusses the challenge of out-of-date hand drawn maps. Today, the problem is that the authoritative maps and information are not being made available to run the base operations. They are being contained inside the "GIS Shop" and not being used to run the installation. The great information product that Bill describes just scratch the surface of the kind of information a GIS can produce for running a facility. The challenge of today is getting those up-to-date maps into the hands of everyone on the base. 

Second Bill describes how GIS can transform raw data into useful information products. GIS maps can, of course, assist in safe operations of ranges and help reduce the environmental impact of military operations as Bill describes. In addition, GIS maps can help support all the operations of a facility. Every organization including Public Works, Utilities, Morale Welfare and Recreation, Provost Marshalls can use the GIS system to run a safe, efficient facility. 

Third, Bill talks about what it takes to implement the system. He talks about the "Easy-to-Use" command line interface and the ability to run on inexpensive $50,000 computers. He tells us that your existing staff doesn't need to be computer literate to run the system but you do need a dedicated IT staff to handle the maintenance and upkeep of the system. This is where is he is slightly over promising. I think we all experienced how challenging these systems were to run and maintain. This was definitely an age which caused us to think every GIS specialist needs Unix Sysadmin training. I remember being so relieved when we moved to PC's in the late 90's that I no longer needed to train 18-year-old Marines on the intricacies of the Sun OS.

The challenge of today is to have the GIS system go beyond serving the environment group. The good news is that the biggest revolution in GIS systems has made it much easier to implement. You can now get a complete Software-As-A-Service system for running your entire facility. Implementing this system would instantly transform the GIS from a back office system to a system of record for the entire installation. The system comes with apps that enable field crews and knowledge workers to consume and contribute information. This is all accomplished at a fraction of the cost of inexpensive computers of the 1980s. 

I didn't used to think of GIS on Installations as an important topic. For my time at Esri I have focused more on using GIS in Intelligence and MIlitary Operations. I have recently realized how important a safe efficient facility is for our operational readiness. I also have become really aware of how far behind our facilities are in implementing a GIS system. Our local government team has done a great job in turning cities into smart communities. We need to take those concepts to turn our bases into smart installations. This will be a focus of mine in 2017, who is with me?

Thanks William Shatner and to Miguel Sevilla-Callejo for sharing. Reminding me how far we have come, and how little has changed.