By David Hubler
Special to the Washington Post
Monday, October 22, 2007

Northrop Grumman will lead a team of contractors developing a high-speed data management and storage system for the National Security Agency that will make it easier for intelligence analysts to access and evaluate key data.

The 51-month contract awarded to the company's Reston-based Missions Systems unit is worth up to $220 million. The work will be part of the Defense Department's Information Management and Storage program.

The program will give analysts access to crucial electronic intelligence data far more quickly than previously possible, said Kevin Henderson, Northrop Grumman's chief systems engineer on the program. The data include electronic signals from air traffic control centers, enemy radar installations and electronic jamming equipment, he said.

The primary purpose of gathering and analyzing such data is to support U.S. aircraft conducting missions in hostile territory, Henderson said. "They need to be aware of the electronic environment out there, especially those things we call threat emitters, systems that could potentially shoot down our aircraft."

The present system is slow and inefficient because most of its data are stored in places that are not connected. Henderson estimated that analysts spend about 80 percent of their time searching for data and just 20 percent analyzing it.

"We're trying to reverse that," he said.

The contract will provide long-term, uniform access to the electronic data and will make it easier to share information between intelligence agencies, Northrop Grumman said. The company will provide architecture design, systems engineering, development and integration, and test and deployment activities.

Information management is critical to success of the program because it will allow analysts to retrieve and work on specific bits of data rather than having to download and sift through entire files that could be unwieldy.

"What we're trying to do is get the right piece of data to the right person in a timely fashion," said Loren Ryder, the Information Management and Storage program manager at Northrop Grumman.

The contracting team will total about 200 information technology workers, with slightly more than half coming from Northrop Grumman. The others will come from its partners, which include BAE Systems, IBM, Sparta, and Sierra Nevada Corp.

Northrop Grumman announced in September that it had won a $462 million award to upgrade and enhance the Army's fleet of RC-12 Guardrail precision targeting, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft.

David Hubler is an associate editor with Washington Technology magazine. For information on this and other contracts, go tohttp://www.washingtontechnology.com.