Ronda Schrenk has had a front-row seat to the evolution of geospatial intelligence in the United States. She started out as an imagery analyst for the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), just before it was combined into the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NEMA), which later became the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. 

Now, she is an advocate for the industry as CEO of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Ronda joins On Orbit this week ahead of USGIF’s annual GEOINT Symposium, to talk about how she has seen the industry evolve. She recounts how one of her first assignments was manually counting boats around a small island, and how much analyst work was done manually in spreadsheets at the time. She talks about the enabling technologies that have increased the speed of insights and made life easier on analysts, and shares context behind some of the recent headlines in the geospatial intelligence industry.