Intelligence

Exploitation Support System [ESS]

The Exploitation Support System (ESS) will be the community's common imagery exploitation support system. Both the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) Exploitation System (NES) and IESS will migrate to ESS by the end of FY01.

ESS will ensure the continued migration of exploitation support capabilities recommended in the Exploitation Process Re-engineering Study (ExPRes). ESS will support all national, theater, and tactical imagery exploitation units of the intelligence and geospatial imagery exploitation units of the intelligence and geospatial community.

The DoD is in the process of establishing a simplified baseline of the best, common information systems across the business functions of the Department. These migration systems represent a stage of process improvement designed at achieving a common set of automated processes and practices in DoD.

The ESS development will migrate existing imagery exploitation capabilities into a single system with the technical and business process enhancements required to meet future imagery exploitation needs. The development of ESS is consistent with the national vision and with NIMA's strategic direction to rapidly migrate legacy imagery intelligence and geospatial information systems into a common, open, interoperable architecture based on commercial technology. This approach, based on extensive study with active community participation, will implement recommendations of the ExPRes to promote cross-community integrated management, timely access to information, creation of an interoperable environment, enhanced collaboration of software tools that will operate within the existing site infrastructure, will provide functionality to process imagery information needs, support selection of imagery and data for exploitation, manage image dissemination, manage exploitation. and support exploitation and reporting. The ESS development contract is expected to be awarded mid-1998 with completion by 2002-2003.

The Exploitation and Reporting Structure currently defines text-based intelligence reports, but imagery/graphics-based intelligence products are not always provided in standard formats. The community will have two primary exploitation support systems, a National Exploitation System (NES) and an Imagery Exploitation Support System (IESS), with imagery/graphics-based reporting done in a standard format defined by EARS by 1998 and will have a single Exploitation Support System (ESS) where all products will be standards based by 2001. The XREP, which manages EARS, is working to generate a single DOD/National Reporting Format to support migration to NES/ESS, and to establish/select standards for graphical reporting.