Taking on new challenges

Hi there. If you are reading this, you are one of the few people who followed by blog.

Let me start off by apologizing for not blogging more. As my friend Lyle Wright pointed out, some of you actually want to hear what I have to say, and I haven’t done a great job of doing that for a while now. There are many excuses but the simplest one is that I didn’t make it a priority.

Ok, enough about that.

Today’s post is about a major change I have made in my career, and focus. As you probably already know, I left my 16-year career at Esri to join a little 120-year-old startup called Janes. I accepted a position as their Chief Product Officer.

I am sure most of you are thinking, but Ben … do you even know anything about fighting ships?

The answer to that, of course, is no, I don’t

But actually, Janes is much more than that.

Much like any publication company, Janes has been moving from traditional book and magazine publishing to being a data-centric business. In fact, they have producing data for over a decade.

So why did I go to Janes?

Fundamentally, Janes is an Open Source Intelligence Agency, which operates as a commercial business. I believe they are unique in this endeavor. Janes has over 800 analysts and contributors, which helps them build a complete set of unclassified intelligence around order-of-battle, equipment, country risk and spending forecasts.

When Janes approached me, I realized this was my unique opportunity to take all of my ideas and concepts I have been presenting over the past decade and put them into practice. I am coming into Janes at a key time when we are working to interconnect our intelligence, leverage effective human-machine teaming to deliver an integrated product.

This matches the journey into the “4th age of intelligence” I have spoken so much about. The cool thing is that we can do this as a commercial organization. We can innovate quickly, and we have a clear path to success.

So I plan to share with you my journey. I will do my best to blog more often and I appreciate any feedback, shaming, or encouragement you want to provide to help me meet that goal.

In case you haven’t looked around recently, I do want to point out that I added a number of useful resources to this website. My writings and slide decks are shared here, and I also captured some of my key references and influences.

Thank you for sticking with me, and I look forward to collaborating along this journey. You can stay subscribed to this blog to follow along, or you can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

GIS Support to Intelligence 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 key question. When starting an analytic task you often know something about the target. Either the signature of the target or the target location. Your approach can be based on what you know, or what is unknown. I have adapted this graphic from the Biltgen and Ryan’s great Activity Based Intelligence Principles and Applications book to illustrate this point.

View fullsize

Monitor

Monitoring methodology is used when a target location and signature are known. This task is critical because monitoring our adversary can help understand intentions and give us indications we can use for warning about future behavior. For example, we may know the location of a military training area, and we can use our knowledge of enemy tactics to understand the types of operations based on preparations. GIS helps us by giving analysts tools to capture their observations in a structured way and allows us to integrate observations across time. A GIS can be used to created dashboards for the integration of multiple observations and to help trigger alerts. In the future AI will probably help replace some of the manual aspects of monitoring and GIS will help analysts visualize the AI analysis to understand why something is happening.

Search

Search methodology is used when a target location is unknown but the signature is known. The target might be a moving asset, or it might be a fixed facility or new type of entity with significance to intelligence. In all cases, the job of the analyst is to try to reduce the search area and leverage collection effectively to determine the location of the target. GIS helps explicitly in many ways. First, analysis of the operating area can help to reduce search areas. Most known targets have factors that influence their location. The factors might be anything from physical terrain constraints or even social and political factors. Mapping these out and combining these factors can dramatically reduce the search area. As targets are located, machine learning can be used to identify these influential factors. Finally, GIS helps analysts record their search activity and collection requirements.

Research

Research methodology is used when the location of the target is known but the signature is unknown. For example, this might be the case for a critical facility. The location of the facility might be known, but that exact usage of the facility or potential indicators is unknown. In this case, GIS helps by giving analysts the ability to capture data about the facility using time and space and then being able to move backward and forward in time to look for patterns and trends. Multiple data sources can be integrated to understand a location in more depth. Reporting from numerous collection methods can be combined to gain a holistic understanding of a target. Analysts can share analytic assessments along with their research data as conclusions are reached.

Discovery

Discovery methodology is used when the most vexing of intelligence problems presents itself. The unknown-unknown, unknown locations, and unknown signatures. In this case, GIS helps provide a foundation for a discovery method of intelligence known as Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI). ABI, with its foundation in location, is a fundamentally spatial approach to resolving unknowns in Intelligence. Discovery methodology is beginning increasingly crucial in the complex intelligence environments we find ourselves in today.

Further Reading

I write about ABI extensively, and the best starting point is these blog posts

If you would like to know about how Esri’s ArcGIS supports Intelligence Production and Analysis, please visit our Intelligence Website

In future posts, I will delve into how GIS-based production and analysis is integrated into standard intelligence products like:

• Indications and Warnings

• Current Intelligence

• General Military Intelligence

• Target Intelligence

• Scientific and Technical Intelligence

• Counter-Intelligence

• Estimative Intelligence

• Intelligence Preparation of the Environment

A new chapter at Esri

I have recently accepted a new position at Esri, as the Defense and Intelligence Industry Manager. This job is in our marketing group and my mission will be to focus on Esri's go-to-market strategy in the Defense and Intelligence Community. I will be responsible for driving growth in new and existing markets. This will involve:

• Market Research Analysis

• Understanding competition

• Presenting at Industry Events

• Publishing thought leading content

• Serve as liaison within Esri as the industry focal point

In some ways, I have been doing parts of these jobs for the past few years. I have only been able to work on these tasks part time and I am really looking forward to being able to focus on this as a full-time job. I have a couple of key team members that have years of experience in marketing that I will rely on to get me up to speed on the tough job I have.

The job I have is going to be challenging, the day I start I need to develop our comprehensive plan for 2017. When I met with Marianna (the head of marketing) she got me really excited about her new and ambitious vision for the Marketing department at Esri. Everything she has planned will make 2017 a very exciting year. I am glad I joined when I did!

I plan to stay technically proficient in the ArcGIS Platform. I think my experience with the technology will give me a unique advantage in this job and I don't want to lose that. With the fast pace change of our technology, this will be tough. I am counting on help from all the great friends I have made over the last 12 years. Please call me out if you see my skills slipping! I know I can't effectively shape our future without knowing where we are. 

I am very excited about this new job! Stay tuned for future posts as I get my feet under me.