Summer Myatt
As technology development and innovation continues to push forward at an increasingly accelerated pace, federal leaders are working to harness the newest technologies while they’re relevant.
Executive Mosaic asked Doug Cossa, chief information officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which emerging technologies he thinks will be most impactful on government missions in the coming years.
To set the scene for the topic, Cossa began by detailing the massive amounts of data the DIA sees, takes in and sifts through, including open source data and measurement and signature intelligence, or MASINT, data.
“We’ve always had more information than we’re able to process and make sense of and disseminate. That’s always been the case. Where I think the next big innovation will come from is in decision modeling,” Cossa revealed in an exclusive video interview.
Decision modeling moves past the binary “yes/no” of traditional data analytics and instead focuses on “understanding what the historical trends are and based on those historical trends, actually matching it up with what potentially could happen in the future,” explained Cossa.
Cossa noted that over the past several decades, the DIA’s data strategies have been isolated within silos of the agency’s collection disciplines, whether geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence or others.
As CIO, Cossa said he wants to bring all of those areas together in one environment where decision modeling can be applied to help the DIA create a more comprehensive picture of its data and make more informed decisions.
In his conversation with Executive Mosaic’s Summer Myatt, Cossa also covered topics like the DIA’s top-secret network modernization efforts, cloud, artificial intelligence, and more. Click here to watch the full video interview, and subscribe to Executive Mosaic’s YouTube channel to stay updated with the latest insights from GovCon leaders.
