Rosettex and NTA

Changing Times Demand New Approaches

The trend to commercial leadership in information technology, biotechnology, microelectronics, and other technology areas, continues to accelerate. The emphasis on reducing mission critical technology "time-to-market" intensifies the need for broader and deeper community access to our nation’s commercial technology base. At the same time, the organizations that have historically provided advancements and new technologies to the intelligence and defense communities have consolidated significantly. The primary focus of the remaining super-companies is the application of military-specific technology – and to a smaller extent, commercial technology – to military systems.

As the supply base for military technology shrinks and the community experiences greater budget pressures, it becomes ever more important to provide incentives for industry and academia to support the community. Understanding this problem, Government executives increasingly make the case for greater exploitation of commercial technology, processes, and products to ensure that their limited R&D resources yield maximum mission impact and return on investment. They have challenged the intelligence and defense communities to find ways to more aggressively leverage commercial technology in order to exploit the very best innovations emerging from the commercial marketplace at affordable prices.

The National Technology Alliance (NTA) is the community initiative that provides Government clients this kind of access to commercial industry.

The NTA

The NTA was established in 1987 to foster relationships with critical commercial technology sectors, reduce the barriers that inhibit commercial firms from working directly with the Government, and motivate commercial firms to address community needs in new product development. The NTA identifies optimum solutions to critical national technology challenges where the cost of development may be shared with the larger commercial marketplace. The NTA has a 15-year history of successes through partnerships with the industry and academia. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is the Executive Agent for the NTA Program and is chartered to execute the program on behalf of the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense, and other Government agencies.

The goal of the NTA in executing technical projects is to identify optimum solutions to Government technology challenges by directly engaging commercial industry. The NTA offers its Government clients access to a business model with all the elements required to make this happen, including:

• A contract mechanism designed to fast track procurement actions
• An organizational structure aligned to streamline management
• A team consisting of more than 85 partners with clearly defined roles to exploit their expertise
• An experienced Program Office that works in close cooperation with its Government clients and NTA industry partners to facilitate access to best-of-class resources and provide independent project oversight. By design, the NTA encourages cross-department and cross-agency cooperation.

World Class Partners

In February and March 2002, NGA awarded procurement agreements to the Rosettex Technology and Ventures Group, a joint venture formed by Sarnoff Corporation and SRI International, and the Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Technology Alliance (CBRTA), administered by 3M Company, to address technology needs in Geospatial Intelligence; Information Processing; Data Management; Information Technology Infrastructure; and Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Defense and Security. Between them, Rosettex and the CBRTA have assembled teams of more than 100 leading research universities, institutes, laboratories, and commercial companies, with facilities in 34 states and across the globe, to support these processes.

Unique Development Processes

The NTA, through Rosettex and CBRTA, offers a unique approach to R&D encompassing two discrete processes.

1.	Analysis of users’ needs to identify the best solutions to meet those needs. NTA partner companies, experts on the organization, missions, operations, and requirements of the communities they serve, identify needs and provide the essential analysis and outreach to Government users of IT. A unique aspect of the NTA’s approach is that potential solutions to identified needs are then compared by independent experts in technology to ascertain best-of-class solutions and the most qualified suppliers. The independence of these experts ensures that competitive business pressures do not unduly influence recommended program decisions. These partners do not participate in the product design, development, or systems integration.
2.	Prototyping, product development, commercialization, technology insertion, and systems integration. Teammates that perform this work are separated from the needs and solutions identification process by a procedural conflict of interest firewall, ensuring that natural prejudice for a company’s own products or business sales pressures do not drive the best-of-class decision.

Summary

The NTA has a rich history of determining user needs, cutting across organizational boundaries to provide rapid access to academic and industry resources that address mission-critical technology development needs. The NTA offers a trusted resource with an innovative business model to tackle difficult problems, make breakthrough advances, and transition revolutionary solutions to a broad spectrum of technology needs.

Please visit the NTA site at http://www.nta.org/