After a 32 year career in senior management positions, including the Deputy Director of the DIA, Ms. Letitia “Tish” A. Long became the fifth director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the first woman to head a major U.S. intelligence agency. She did not define her leadership through the lens of gender but instead saw challenges and opportunities she faced through the lens of any other leader of the time and focused on building a transformational vision for the Agency” (Washington Post). Her tenure began on August 9, 2010, during a period of time that faced challenges including recruiting and developing a workforce that could respond quickly to “evolving national security threats, ongoing scientific and technological advances, changing skills and expectations of workers”, making sense of the increasing quantities of data, and building a competitive strategy that would ensure the Agency would provide customers with relevant products of the future. (National Academy of Sciences, 2013).
Ms. Long was well-educated and trained to …show more content…
Director Long described how NGA has decided to not only pursue, but to be the leader in the Intelligence Community (IC) on revolutionary IC Information Technology Enterprise (ITE) advancements in the coming years—beginning with the IC Common Desktop in conjunction with DIA. She also discussed the importance of continuing to drive innovation in visualization, not just in GIS and the traditional NGA portfolio, but also in leading the charge to "connect the bits and bytes to the brick and mortar"—visualizing the cyber landscape and threat environment. She described visualization as the best means of unlocking the complexities found in big