Collaborative Spirit, Diverse Ethos to Spark Innovations

As the utility of GEOINTincreases, there’s a need to foster broad collaboration, get actionable data, and encourage truly representative diversity. By Linda McCann

GEOINT has today become crucial to senior decision makers and militaries, who heavily rely on geospatial capabilities to meet their requirements.

At the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO), we deliver GEOINT to help decision makers prevent the next war, and ensure we are postured to respond in the event we find ourselves in a conflict. To ensure we can continue to meet our leaders’ expectations, AGO is focused on three lines of effort.

Three Lines of Effort Collaboration For supporting and defending the global order, democracies will often be working together in coalitions. So it appears simple that all coalition partners would all be using the same data. This sounds straightforward. But it is not. There are layers of challenges we face when trying to share our data with our partners: licensing; national priorities; vendors maximising profit; different systems; and, of course, the large size of the data we want to share.

Our remit has become global, and response time has decreased. We are gathering, processing and analysing data on larger areas of the Earth than ever before, and no single agency or company can do it all. Collaboration is critical to maintaining coverage and currency of geospatial data on a global scale.

AGO is working to de-conflict our commercial imagery and data purchasing across Australian agencies and with our international partners. Our aim is to achieve open and shareable licensing arrangements that meet our needs, and avoid duplication of effort with partners and industry. I realise this is inimical to those who are in the business of selling data. But if I can’t share your data with my close partners, I will look to buy it from somewhere else. Working from the same data is a priority for AGO and our partners. If you get on-board with us early in this journey, we can design a system that works for us and for you.

Data Data is growing exponentially. We all know this. Our challenge is to collect, process, store, analyse, move and disseminate the right data to the right people, at the right time. The cost of storing and sharing huge amounts of data will become prohibitive. We will need to become better at collecting, storing and sharing only the data we need. The acceleration of Australian

Defence capabilities is increasing the pressure on us to resolve these issues quickly, which we’re capable of achieving by working together.

Automation and machine learning (ML) is a key part of our business now and into the future. Having excellent artificial intelligence (AI) tools will be increasingly critical for us, as it will not be possible for humans to make all the decisions about our data. But the process of building the AI and ML tools is labour intensive up front, which leads me to the third and most important thing we need to get better at across our industry. Attracting, recruiting and retaining the best people.

People Collectively, we are investing billions in bigger and faster capabilities. But we need people to make the most of these new sources and volumes of information. Many of us are operating in economies of full employment – in Australia, we have the lowest unemployment rate (3.4%) in nearly 50 years. This means we need to attract the best people into our industry, and work hard to keep them.

Geospatial professionals are in short supply. We need to offer excellent career opportunities and working conditions. We need to attract from the broadest cross-section of the population and invest in pathways from schools and universities to a geospatial profession. We need to scrutinise our diversity and inclusion practices around neuro-diversity, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, age and sexuality, to ensure we aren’t unconsciously excluding whole groups of potentially brilliant GEOINTers.

To take full advantage of our emerging capabilities are in demand across the world. We need to be an industry of choice, fairness and opportunity

We often use gender as a quick litmus test of diversity as it can be easy to see. For example, I attended the Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) conference in London in February this year and was struck by how few women were there. With more than 20 years in Australia’s Defence Department, I am used to being the only woman in the room. But at a conference of over 600 attendees, there were only a handful of women. I had a young, junior female member of AGO with me, and I was conscious she would have struggled to see herself in the industry leadership that was on display over those couple of days. I expect there was limited diversity in other areas, but that can be more difficult to discern.

achieved by a diverse workforce.

There is a temptation to think we have years to work on these challenges and that we can kick this can down the road. We do not, and we cannot. We need to build strong partnerships now. We are in this together. GEOINT agencies rely heavily on the geospatial industry for capability, expertise and capacity. The more closely we work together, the better our mutual outcomes.

Our priorities are clear: we need an industry that can help us achieve national security objectives, an industry that is capable, responsive and trustworthy. Together we can deliver this through diverse workforces, and building genuine partnerships.

People will always be the critical factor. The skills we need to take full advantage of our emerging capabilities are in demand across the world. We need to be an industry of choice, fairness and opportunity.

Of course, this is not unique to DGI. It is representative of our industry. Ignoring whole sections of the population and continuing to recruit in our own image is like fighting with one hand tied behind our back. Why would we limit our access to the best brains, the best innovators, and the best leaders? In the intelligence business specifically, a homogeneous workforce is not a recipe for success.

We need genuine diversity of thought, background, approach, expertise and skills, to arrive at assessments that have been appropriately contested. The sort of innovation we need to keep pace with emerging tech can only be

Linda McCann

Assistant Secretary, GEOINT Mission and Engagement, Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation

Linda is an Exec at the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO), and a member of Australia’s national intelligence community. Linda led the organisation from July 2021 to March 2022 between substantive Directors. Her current role is Assistant Secretary GEOINT Mission and Engagement. She has been with the Australian Department of Defence since 1999, working across intelligence, policy, corporate, international engagement and operational roles.