Geospatial Information Officer

Geospatial information officer (GIO) is the head of geospatial information technology within a civilian, business, government and/or military organizations.

Due to cost saving issues, many civilian, business, government and military organizations took the chief information officer concept and created the Geospatial Information Officer. Recent increased use of geospatially oriented data for civilian, business, government and military, have required cost efficiencies in collection, production and analysis.

In March 2008, the U.S. Army Geospatial–Enterprise Governance Board (GGB) created the GIO position, with the Director, U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) as the U.S. Army's "central manager responsible for coordination, assessment, and synchronization of all Army policies and standardization requirements for the geospatial information enterprise, which will help enable interoperability across battle command systems, bringing the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines closer to the realization of a unified Common Operational Picture (COP). This COP allows the Department of Defense to deploy assets efficiently and effectively by providing the warfighter with the integrated capability to receive, correlate, and display a common tactical picture, including planning applications that may include location of friendly, hostile, and neutral units, assets, and reference points."

“Geospatial data is the foundation for a common operational picture, and the lack of policy and standards in this area prevents a unified COP today,” said Mr. Burkhardt. “The technology is available to enable battle command systems to collect information once and allow discovery and exploitation by all, however, without these standards, it is difficult to present unified, understandable solutions within and outside of the Army.”

"The Geospatial-Enterprise Governance Board, co-chaired by the U.S. Army Chief of Engineers, and the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, addresses Army Geospatial-Enterprise issues impacting current and future force requirements while striving to administer and facilitate the development of a net-enabled Army geospatial enterprise. Such an enterprise allows actionable geospatial information to be tasked, posted, processed, and used as needed from the National to the Soldier level through a distributed database and architecture based on a common core of software, standards, data formats, and algorithms. A key component of this shared enterprise will be established policy, in conjunction with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, to pass value added data back to national data stores."

Army Appoints Service's First Geospatial Information Officer, March 2008

GIO Leads Geospatial Enterprise, June 2008

In Search of a GIO

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Geospatial Information Officer

Theater Geospatial Database

Mission Specific Data Sets (MSDS)

Stewardship: Geospatial Intelligence / GEOINT