Author Description

Over the past decade, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has evolved its programming organization multiple times, along with the process it uses for managing its resource investments. Each of these iterations was done to address challenges and inefficiencies. NGA is now considering additional steps to improve its process and is seeking to improve its practices through internal improvements, such as gaining an understanding of how previous changes affected the overall effectiveness of its resource management process, and what can be learned from other organizations. NGA is now entering a fourth period of acquisition restructuring that is intended to improve on how the planning and programming phases are managed. NGA asked the RAND Corporation to review the programming phase of the Intelligence Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation (IPPBE) process. The authors looked at three organizational eras (pre-2013, 2013-2018, and 2018 to the present) to determine the conditions, causes, and effects of performance and effectiveness generally and of previous changes to this phase of NGA IPPBE for each era. NGA is not alone in its ongoing effort to modernize its IPPBE structure to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Although NGA has conducted several previous internal studies to identify areas for IPPBE process improvement, this research is the first to synthesize findings between external literature and findings gleaned from structured subject-matter expert interviews to highlight crucial program-process issues for NGA leadership to absorb and address in any future IPPBE restructuring phase.