Last week I attended the annual DGI 2012 show held in London at the QEII Conference Centre. With approximately 750 delegates DGI 2012 was the largest in its history. Recently Snowflake has been growing in the Defence and Intelligence space so this show is becoming a must attend for us. Initially I was just going to attend but a last minute offer to showcase some of our Air Traffic Management testbed work on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) stand was too good to turn down.
First speaker was Major General Jerry Thomas. Now if ever there was a lesson in public speaking this was it! Major General Jerry Thomas was incredibly animated, passionate and totally owned the stage. No matter what the talk, when you see somebody like this in action it's just fascinating to watch let alone listen. Anyway, his talk on 'Multi Intelligence Support to the Warfighter' was in my opinion one of the best of the conference and contained some classic quotes: "Geospatial is the backbone of intelligence - without it you're a soggy heap on the ground", a nice addition to a Vanessa Lawrence (Director General of Ordnance Survey) quotation "Everything happens somewhere" adding "Everything happens somewhere in the future" referring to intelligence needing to know where and when. But my favourite was "If you don't know where you're going, and what's there when you get there, then there's no point having all the latest shiny kit!". Anyway, enough of the quotes, Major General Jerry Thomas gave a really interesting insight into the changing world of intelligence with the advent of Social media resulting in over 80% of intelligence already being in the public domain on chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook etc. The problem is making sense of it all and here's where 'the' geo-int buzz word comes in, it's all about 'Fusion' (multi-int Fusion to be precise). It's no good gathering all this information, it needs to be broken down and re-assembled in order for it to be meaningful, much like baking a cake - the ingredients on their own taste awful but baked in the right way you have a good end result. Here in the UK our 'geo-int baking' will be performed in the Defence Intelligence Geospatial Fusion Centre which is a new purpose built facility due to open in Summer 2013.
A couple of quick mentions, John Day, Director of Defence, ESRI gave a talk on utilising Cloud for Geo-Int. Interestingly his talk wasn't a technical one but a financial one. With the defence cuts across the board, John made a really good financial argument for Cloud, stating that Cloud based services could be procured only when required operationally and so could be funded from Operational Expenditure rather than Capital Expenditure making procurement a much less painful process. John also had a great quote: "The definition of Legacy, is that Legacy is the stuff that works". A quick mention of Barry Barlow from NGA, Barry is Director of Acquisition and showed a live demo on an eAIP (electronic Aeronautical Information Procedure) on an iPad. It was great to see this centre stage as this is something that Snowflake has worked on in the OGC AIM testbeds. In fact we've worked on the next generation of the eAIP so watch this space - I might be up there one day!
Last talk of the plenary was from Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller and she was first class. One of the best talks at a conference I've seen in a long, long time. 'Call me Eliza' she said coming on stage. Eliza was Director General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and gave a really insightful talk on her experiences of leading MI5. In the wake of 9/11 MI5 had to radically change and one of her first challenges was to get the government to double MI5's budget, this happened overnight. Now I can't think of any government department ever doing that yet I can see how it got the nod - I for one would definitely not mess with Eliza. Interestingly under her leadership MI5 opened up and for the first time staff could tell there families what they did, in fact staff could actually invite their families in for open days! One point Eliza made was that as Director General of MI5 you are judged not by what you stop but by what you don't stop. With the realisation that not everything can be prevented, to me that makes it one of hardest jobs in the UK. Eliza also gave some great leadership advice which I do no justice by summarising: look after your staff, go out of your way to encourage ideas, recognise the value of criticism (no matter what your role or experience), don't think you know it all, have humility and finally no matter how serious the situation have fun in what you do!
To round off the plenary was a panel session and Vanessa Lawrence was one of the panel members. Vanessa stated one of the challenges of geo is understanding the users situation. Now I've heard that so many times at various geo shows that it just washed over me at time. It wasn't until I saw a picture of a soldier up to his neck in a ditch of water with gunfire all around and using a tablet PC to find a way out, then I realised that understanding the users situation and making geo usable can be the difference between life and death.
After a really good morning I did my duty for Open Standards and manned the OGC stand showing off our Aviation testbed work not to mention evangelising GML and all things standards. OGC has done a great job in Defence and Intelligence and sharing the stand with my good friend Steven Ramage (Executive Director, Marketing and Communications) is always a great experience. You can't help but stand back and admire the networking master class Steven gives. If I say so myself Steven and I worked it pretty well, so much so that I didn't manage to get into any of the talks for the rest of the day. During my time on the stand I noticed one passer by go past with a Snowflake Software sponsored Cambridge Conference Exchange bag. With much excitement I just had to grab a quick picture.
Unfortunately Day 2 was pretty much the same and I spent the majority of my time on stand, that said I did make it to Vanessa's talk in the morning to listen to Ordnance Survey's activities for the Olympics. It's good to see the OS using its considerable geo capabilities to help the Defence and Intelligence community gather the intelligence information required to manage such a huge event. Due to its secure nature it's all a bit behind the scenes but it's clear that for the Olympics a lot of government departments are working together sharing resources and expertise - good to know as I have tickets! Whilst we're talking about Ordnance Survey, its amazing how powerful the OS brand is in this community, unlike other events where there's always a bit of OS bashing going on, you will never hear a bad word said and OS is held in the uttermost regard. Due to it's history you get the feeling that the Defence community have never quite let Ordnance Survey go and they still see it as part of the family.
To sum up ... all in all I'd recommend attending DGI. If you're into geo, geo-int doesn't get a more interesting application and the pace of change in this field is frightening. OGC has a lot of momentum in this space so you can expect open standards to play a big role in opening up the Defence and Intelligence space to a wider community than ever before. See you there next year. In the meantime do what you can to see Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller speak.
