By Steve Panzer, ObjectFX
Published in Military Geospatial Technology, April 2009
When implemented well, public-private partnerships bring the best of both worlds together. A cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), in which private enterprise provides innovative technology for public sector review, analysis, support and guidance, is an excellent example of a public-private partnership that works. This partnership leverages resources and knowledge from the private sector, while providing guidance from the public sector and insight into the specific needs of individual government agencies.
A CRADA offers both parties the opportunity to share technical expertise, ideas and information in a protected environment. Originally authorized in 1986 as a means of expanding technology transfer between federal laboratories and the private sector, the CRADA program ultimately strives to advance science and technology that not only meets government objectives but also has viability in other potential commercial applications.
The candid interactions that are nurtured through a CRADA bring both public enterprises and private companies closer together for a mutual goal—delivering state-of-the-art technology solutions that solve real mission-critical problems. Now more than ever, partnerships that leverage resources and stretch research budgets are critical to the government in meeting the needs of its citizens and securing public confidence. As our country continues to face economic tough times, the government is expected to do more with less, and get it right the first time.
By establishing a CRADA, government works closely with the private sector to ensure custom requirements and features of individual government agencies are built into products, more efficiently meeting the needs of that government agency while reducing costs and maximizing resources.
For example, one of the key problems facing the intelligence community is the constantly increasing need for skilled analysts, an ever-expanding amount of intelligence data, and the urgency to sift through these mounds of data to find actionable intelligence quickly. As senior analysts retire, there are fewer seasoned analysts to make sense of the deluge of information, so important data might be lost or overlooked, and critical trends are not identified. As junior analysts continually take the reins from senior analysts, it becomes even more crucial that procedures are captured and standardized, condensing routine intellectual labor so more time can be spent identifying actionable intelligence.
Through a CRADA with geospatial solutions provider ObjectFX, the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA) is moving to quickly and efficiently address this challenge by enhancing ObjectFX’s offerings and defining and fine-tuning the features required for its newest product, a spatiotemporal rules engine, designed with input through the CRADA to specifically address real-world intelligence community use cases and scenarios.
Working with NGA via a CRADA initially signed in 1999, ObjectFX has been providing its Java-based geospatial software platform, which enables the integration into enterprise applications of location-based services, like vehicle routing and address geocoding, for organizations throughout civilian, intelligence and defense agencies. In response to its customers’ requests and needs, ObjectFX added support for geospatial data types, like raster/vector maps and high resolution imagery specific to the intelligence community, as well as military standard 2525B symbology to its suite of geospatial solutions. When the intelligence community expressed the need for a spatiotemporal rules capability, SpatialRules was born.
SpatialRules, a product of this agreement, is a spatiotemporal rules engine that manages a flood of real-time sensor-based information, enabling analysts to make better use of their time by more quickly and efficiently identifying actionable intelligence— getting the right information to the right people at the right time. A spatiotemporal rules engine is a software component for analyzing spatial and temporal conditions against a set of rules, in this instance scanning specific areas of interest for suspicious activity based on proximity, density, and routing and tracking information.
Before implementing this rules engine, intelligence analysts spent a significant amount of time retrieving data, studying movement patterns on a geospatial display, and manually detecting events for further investigation. A spatiotemporal rules engine significantly reduces the manual labor by automating the monitoring process, enabling geospatial event processing in real time. Increased accuracy and efficiency of monitoring provides more time for analysis of high interest objects or events, exponentially increasing the probability that critical information will reach its destination in time to impact a critical decision.
Through this ongoing partnership, NGA and the rest of the intelligence community are benefiting from direct, hands-on access to leading COTS tools and technologies that can be modified or created to meet custom intelligence needs and requirements.
Infinitely renewable, these collaborative, cooperative and mutually beneficial partnerships utilize known government providers with forward-thinking and innovative technologies to solve government problems at minimal cost. By combining resources like facilities, equipment, expertise and personnel, the government can meet its ultimate goal of doing more with less, stretching research budgets while consuming fewer resources.
Private Benefits
The CRADA provides equal opportunity to all private sector companies, enabling any company with common research and development goals to enter into a CRADA agreement with a government agency. As the relationship is mutually beneficial, the private company also realizes benefits from the partnership. Aside from the fact that private companies are given insight into specific needs of government agencies (within defined security clearance boundaries), they are also able to access agency data, data standards and processes within the designated facility, running it through their technology to enable a better understanding of specific use cases and scenarios.
Companies gain an added benefit of acquiring more depth of knowledge regarding the government agencies they serve, expanding that company’s expertise and value with other government agencies moving forward. Proprietary rights and ideas of the private company are also protected. In signing this agreement, all parties agree to keep research results confidential until published or commercialized, and the private research partner typically takes title to any inventions.
In order to most efficiently meet the needs of government agencies and their customer bases, public-private partnerships are gaining momentum. The government’s demands for more advanced technological innovations while balancing smaller budgets can be met through the CRADA, truly a mutually beneficial relationship between a federal agency and a private company. While the country continues to face economic hardship, partnering with the private sector not only provides more quickly commercialized technology that directly addresses the needs of individual government agencies, but by optimizing resources, it also stretches the research and development budget.