Supporting Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA)

Enabling Single Point Search to Help DoD Bring Isolated Personnel Home Safely
Every second counts when service members or civilians are in danger abroad. Whether a service member was separated from their unit, a civilian was kidnapped, or an American needs to get back home safely, JPRA coordinates military, diplomatic, and civil efforts to rescue Americans from being captured and exploited by U.S. adversaries.

JPRA stakeholders need data from disparate systems, computer networks, and security domains across several U.S. agencies and international partners. Without a unified system, getting this data could cost time that a person in danger may not have. Thus, JPRA needed a system to provide a single point of access to everyone that needs the information.

INCATech collaborated with JPRA to understand their data search challenge and develop the Personnel Recovery Information Data System (PRIDS). PRIDS is a globally accessible, collaborative data management service to process, store, retrieve, and manage all information and data associated with a Personnel Recovery event. Our team combined expertise across geospatial solutions, cloud-native design, data science, data management, and user-centered design.

We applied our user-centered methodology to research user needs, develop personas, and conduct usability testing. These proactive efforts helped our development and design teams offer improved workflows. We used data science techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP) to process terabytes of disorganized, unstructured data. Our geospatial experts ensured end-users can visualize geographic locations associated with documents.

We used an Agile process to deliver value incrementally to JPRA, conducting demonstrations and gathering frequent user and stakeholder feedback to ensure PRIDS was on the right track. Further, we trained Beta Users on PRIDS functions and capabilities using practical exercises, demonstrations, and reference materials.