Justin Bennett was already an accomplished professional in the geospatial industry when he chose to advance his career with a Doctor of Business Administration from UMSL. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

When Justin Bennett makes up his mind, he jumps in and doesn’t look back.

That was Bennett’s mindset when he enlisted in the United States Air Force after high school, kicking off a four-year stretch where he acquired the skills that would fuel his post-military career. That was again his mindset when, in 2014, he decided to leave his job to scratch his entrepreneurial itch and started Geodata IT, a company that grew quickly and sold in 2020.

And that, too, was Bennett’s mindset when he decided to enroll in the Doctor of Business Administration program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “I was looking for an opportunity to fill gaps in my skill set,” Bennett said. “I’m more of a practitioner, and UMSL’s DBA program has a practitioner approach.”

Bennett has long been connected to St. Louis’ growing geospatial industry, and when he successfully defended his dissertation – “Enhancing Interoperability in Geospatial Analytics Systems: Navigating Diverse Standards for Optimal Data Integrity” – on May 2, he became UMSL’s first DBA alumnus with geospatial-focused research.

“I’ve had the greatest of experiences with UMSL, the faculty, staff and everybody has been phenomenal,” Bennett said. “Just world class. I can’t think of a better opportunity, and I’m a tough critic. I’m a serial entrepreneur, so I don’t like a lot of red tape and things of that nature. They made it very digestible for a working professional, and I received a quality education. Every faculty member was legitimately, strategically positioned and paired into those programs.”

Bennett, who is the principal consultant for a company he co-founded, Pinnacle Business Strategies, said the breadth of knowledge within the College of Business Administration faculty members helped make his DBA experience successful. After conversations with Ekin Pellegrini, the founding director of the DBA program, about the research he wanted to pursue, Pellegrini connected him with Trilce Encarnacion, an assistant professor in the Department of Supply Chain and Analytics.

“What stood out to me about Justin’s topic and his approach was his vast knowledge and genuine curiosity,” Encarnacion said. “I remember telling him that he had so many research questions that answering them all might take him 10 years! He brought great energy and depth to the work, and it was clear he was deeply invested in making a meaningful contribution.”

For Bennett, that initial conversation confirmed that Encarnacion, who has done extensive research in geospatial fields, was the perfect person to chair Bennett’s committee.

“Trilce is amazing. I would call her a genius in her own craft for what she does,” Bennett said. “She had done geolocation intelligence work in the past related to supply chain, so that was a good fit because she not only understands the problem set, but she also had the model I needed to measure the data. She’s been doing confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. It was a really good merger of not only the conceptual and theoretical model but also the applicability. She had that knowledge base to be able to help get me across the finish line.”

Coming out of high school, Bennett initially wanted to study to become an electrical engineer, but financial realities steered him toward the military. He shifted into the technology and engineering side of the Air Force intelligence community.

“I spent four years in the Air Force doing what now is the term geospatial, but back then, it was really about navigation and providing accurate identification of surveillance positions,” Bennett said. “It was identifying where you’re going to perform missions, what surrounds the area, integrating electronic intelligence and things like that.”

After four years in the Air Force, Bennett used those considerable skills to work his way up the ladder at SAIC, then Raytheon and then for a little over five years at NJVC, where he was a senior solutions architect. Then he decided to start Geodata IT.

Bennett had no doubts that he was ready for the entrepreneurial challenge.

“I had someone tell me, ‘Hey, you know, there are a lot of small businesses that fail,’” Bennett said. “And I turned to look at him and said, ‘I won’t fail.’ That was a driver for me. I understand that he wasn’t necessarily wrong, that a lot of small business probably do fail, but I was just like, ‘I’m not going to fail.’ There’s something instinctual there. When somebody tells you that you can’t do something but you know your goals, your natural instinct is to think, ‘How dare you tell me that?’”

Bennett’s successful startup drew attention. In 2020 Geodata IT was acquired by Freedom Consulting Group – Bennett became an equity investor – then a year later the company was again acquired, this time by a private equity group. Bennett stayed on through January 2024.

Bennett started his DBA program at UMSL with a clear idea in mind. He had worked in conjunction with an agency in St. Louis on a major safety of navigation modernization project in 2014.  This modernization was a direct result of the USS Guardian 2013 incident; in which an Avenger-class mine countermeasures ship in the United States Navy ran aground on a reef in the Sulu Sea in the Philippines.

“I always in the back of my mind thought to myself, how could you run a half-billion-dollar ship into a coral reef based on mapping data?” he said. “Nobody’s really measured how you go about understanding things like interoperability, which is the standards and data integrity piece, and understanding how you get those as outcomes.”

Over his two decades in the geospatial field, Bennett always had the feeling that the industry lacked an effective way to measure business outcomes for geospatial. His literature review in the DBA program confirmed that hunch, so he set about focusing on how different geographic information systems and technology solutions can better communicate and maximize interoperability.

Bennett’s goal with his DBA research was, essentially, find ways to match technology – including and especially artificial intelligence – with the human element.

“There’s a disconnect between the technology and the front end, which is the people, and that is what I wanted to focus on,” Bennett said. “I packaged that up, and I figured out a way to measure the business side of the geospatial world and analytics of what we do, like workflow and tradecraft. I started with four constructs to measure the outcomes, and I plan to build that out into what’s called the Geospatial Analytics Intelligence Quotient. I’m building a framework, along with others I’ve recruited. I want an army of academics to study and build out ways of measuring different aspects of the geospatial analytics workflow on the business side.

“That way we could answer things like, how effective are our geospatial standards? How does data complexity moderate this relationship? How does user training and technical mastery mediate this relationship? How does that impact the process to get to data integrity outcomes?”

Bennett is building an AI platform called the Geospatial Research Platform, which he demoed at GEOINT Symposium this May at the America’s Center in downtown St. Louis.

Bennett said he was pleased with the good feedback.

Pellegrini and the rest of the members of the DBA program were proud he presented as another success story of the UMSL program.

“Justin is an ideal DBA scholar,” said Pellegrini. “He came to our program with a strong academic foundation, 10-plus industry certifications and a proven leadership track record in geospatial intelligence. Complementing his impressive credentials, Justin is humble, intellectually curious and highly disciplined, which led to dissertation research of significant scholarly and practical relevance.”