Ms. Jennifer Edgin is the Senior Technical Advisor to the Director of Intelligence, Headquarters, Marine Corps. In her present position, she is responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and overseeing all intelligence information management and technology initiatives.
Ms. Edgin responded to questions in writing in late June.
Q: What is the Marine Corps Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance Enterprise Accelerator?
A: The Marine Corps Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance Enterprise (MCISRE) Accelerator is a fast-tracked design and development framework that brings together Intelligence Marines, designers, developers, and key stakeholders as a Cohort to rapidly design and develop minimally viable products (MVPs), services, and capabilities that solve user defined problems.
The Accelerator is our method for continuous innovation which creates critical mass for quickly defining problem solution fit and getting capabilities into the hands of users.
Q: I understand that Tellus is a mashup of Life Alert, OnStar, and Waze that provides operations and intelligence personnel with the ability to report significant activities (SIGACT) or events. Why were those three applications selected? Is Tellus a commercial technology or did the Marine Corps develop it? Where did the idea come from?
A: Tellus was conceived of and designed by active duty Intel Marines. This Cohort originally defined a problem statement that was too broad to build in 12 weeks. We call these types of problems a challenge area.
The Accelerator framework engages the users to continually break down the challenge area into a set of discretely defined problem statements. The Cohort used actual data and information to prioritize the discrete problems so that our largest and most critical problem — the inability to share information quickly — was narrowed down to sharing essential elements of SIGACTS quickly. This problem was what the Tellus solution was designed to solve.
When defining the functionality of an app, we encourage the Cohort to reference capabilities that they use in their consumer lives, hence the references to Life Alert, OnStar, and Waze.
Our Marines and developers then went through a collaborative concept development and design process to define in detail the initial Tellus concept and features. This specificity allows the development team to implement a solution that is matched to the user expectation so at the end of the 12 weeks the Accelerator has produced a product that our users want and will actually use.
At the end of the 12-week cycle, Tellus emerged as a browser-based app that enables quick tempo reporting, notification of, and responses to significant events. It lets Marines drop icons directly onto their map that represent significant events and/or activities. Each icon is tagged with a minimum set of metadata to include the event type, location, date/time, and reporting unit information. Users may enter additional comments (up to 140 characters). Upon submit, an alert is generated and broadcast.
Tellus is GOTS software (HTML/JavaScript) that uses commercial mapping software (Esri's ArcGIS) to provide interactive map displays and geospatial services.
Q: How do Marines access Tellus? Is it just for intelligence Marines or is it intended for use by all Marines in an operational force? Is Tellus still in experimentation or is it being used on the battlefield now? Is Tellus a classified system?
A: Tellus is not a classified software application; it is system and domain agnostic. It has transitioned from the Accelerator to a Marine Corps Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) for further enhancement. It is intended for use by all Marines. Users can access Tellus through their browser via a URL. Opportunities to evaluate Tellus and provide feedback occur through the Marine Corps Cyber Range environment.
Q: Can you talk about how Marines would use and share information provided by Tellus?
A: Imagine you are a Marine out on patrol and you see suspicious activity. You can open the Tellus app, select the icon that represents the activity you need to report and as soon as you hit submit, that information would be sent back to a forward operating intelligence or operations center and shared with garrison sites supporting the current operations from a short-term and long-term perspective. It is designed to work like commercial apps that people use for reporting traffic conditions, like Waze.
Q: What is the next step for Tellus?
A: We practice an open source software model for sharing developed code and continuing to expand the product. The Tellus app is being enhanced by our CRADA effort, which will gather additional metrics and user feedback to refine features based on user needs. The objective is to make the Tellus app available in a MCISRE app store.