Name: Abe Usher
Title: Chief Technology Officer
Company: HumanGeo
Leader of the Nerd Brigade. To better support the Defense Intelligence Agency's Analytic Modernization initiative, Usher assembled a team of software engineers and dubbed it the Nerd Brigade. The agile group developed and deployed four analytical tools in four months, which resulted in significant savings for DIA. One tool, an analyst search engine, now allows users to perform three times as many record updates as before. The Nerd Brigade has been so successful that DIA wants to make it available to other intelligence agencies.