Leadership

Our leaders foster innovation, teamwork, and excellence

The executive management team at Image Matters is comprised of widely respected leaders who are among the most successful professionals in providing advanced geospatial and Semantic-AI solutions. They are passionate innovators committed to industry leadership in enterprise modernization and next-generation modeling and analytic solutions. They focus on providing sound, pragmatic, and visionary leadership to our employees, our customers and our partners.

Kurt Buehler

Managing Partner

Mr. Buehler is a seasoned geospatial industry leader with experience in enterprise architecture and planning, needs assessments, standards development, data modeling, compliance and interoperability testing, business case development, system integration and software development. As Managing Partner of Image Matters, Mr. Buehler runs day-to-day business operations and remains active as a senior consultant. Prior to joining Image Matters, Mr. Buehler was the co-founder of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where he provided leadership and program management. Mr. Buehler successfully initiated and led the OGC Technical Committee, Interoperability Program, and Compliance Program until his departure in 2004. While at USACERL, as a team leader, he managed the research and development program for the GRASS Geographic Information System, one of the earliest successful open-source projects.

"We strive mightily for vibrant open relationships with our customers. We are always learning and improving through them."

Harry Niedzwiadek

Chairman

Mr. Niedzwiadek has spent his full career managing, developing, and deploying information technology solutions for a wide variety of government and commercial clients. His prime responsibilities at Image Matters include corporate strategy, focus, performance, and market development. He has a diversified background in providing innovative solutions for defense, intelligence, homeland security, telecommunications, information technology, transportation, environmental, and natural resource industries. His experience ranges from modernizing large enterprise systems for defense, intelligence, and natural resource management customers, to leading commercial software product teams. He has extensive background in earth measurement and modeling sciences, research and development, and in systems and software engineering. His latest passion is Semantic-AI, which he perceives as a game-changing technology. Mr. Niedzwiadek was formerly a Vice President at Autometric, Inc. (now Boeing), where he served as Division Manager and Chief Scientist. He also worked for GTE (now Verizon) where he led several efforts to expand GTE’s business in commercial imagery and the Internet.

"We have an exciting vision of the future and an understanding of how to get there. We aspire to being change agents that have a lasting positive impact on society."

John Davidson

Partner, Director of Enterprise Modernization

Mr. Davidson has a solid track record developing commercial software. He leads enterprise modernization programs and enterprise architecture efforts at Image Matters. He also contributes to research and development efforts for several emerging Image Matters’ software products. He has proven experience in all phases of the software development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, design, development, testing, operations and maintenance. Prior to launching Image Matters, Mr. Davidson was a Senior Technical Consultant for Genasys, a commercial GIS software company, where he was Product Manager and technical lead for Genasys’ Spatial API software developer’s toolkit, which accounted for nearly 50% of Genasys’ sales revenue in the U.S. and U.K. Mr. Davidson has also held numerous engineering project leadership roles in the OGC.

"We are a well-oiled people-process-tools story unfolding with each new challenge. We are lean, agile and obsessive about quality and execution. We deliver early and often to achieve total customer satisfaction."

Randy Gladish

Partner, Director of Research and Development

Mr. Gladish has extensive experience building imagery and geospatial exploitation systems for defense, intelligence and medical applications. He leads R&D at Image Matters. Specializing in high-performance data exploitation, data fusion and analytics, Semantic-AI, visualization systems, and workflow optimization, he has extensive experience in complete lifecycle management, having developed FactWeave, Image Matters’ flagship product, and RemoteView, the highly successful imagery and geospatial analysis system, which has served the defense and intelligence community for two decades. His experience includes strategic planning, concept development and needs assessment, requirements derivation, standards development, data modeling, software design and development, and system integration. Previously, Mr. Gladish was Chief Architect at Textron Systems, where he guided senior business leadership in developing technology roadmaps, developed strategic product technology plans, and was the lead developer of all classified projects.

"Our quest for innovation drives our corporate psyche. No matter how difficult the challenge, we thrive in pursuit of a better solution... and we don't rest till we find it."

Stacy Hardin

Director of Finance and Operations

Ms. Hardin has over 20 years of experience in Finance, Business Administration/Operations, and Contracts management, the past seven years with Image Matters. She has dynamic communication and analytical skills. At Image Matters, Ms. Hardin oversees all facets of Finance, Contracts management, and Project planning. She also plays a critical role by supporting the Executive team in strategic decision-making and operations as Image Matters continues to enhance and provide quality products and services to our customers. Ms. Hardin also plays a crucial role in compliance, risk management, and business development. She exemplifies the personal qualities of integrity, credibility, and loyalty to Image Matters, along with dedication to our mission. Prior to starting at Image Matters, Ms. Hardin worked as the Director of Accounting for ASI Govt, where she was responsible for the Accounting team and all accounting operations, including AP/AR, Payroll, Budgeting, Audits, reconciliations, and financial analysis. She has also led two accounting system conversions, worked extensively with external auditing firms during comprehensive annual internal audits, and assisted on a large M&A Venture.

"We have a lean, agile, and profit-minded approach to operations. We also take a service-minded approach to employees, clients, and partners. "

Jeff Ehman

Director of Geospatial Operations

Dr. Ehman is an expert in Geographic Information Systems. He has extensive experience applying GIS, GPS, and remote sensing technologies to addressing land, facility, natural resource, and environmental problems. He is an expert in designing geospatial infrastructure, systems, and web-mapping applications as components of public-sector projects to promote transparency, provide decision support, and deliver content. His broad subject area expertise includes urban, installation, utility, land use, natural resource planning and management, environmental modeling, wildlife biology, micro-meteorology, and research on carbon-cycling and climate change impacts. In addition, as a project manager and a lead analyst, Dr. Ehman is engaged in the data content standard development and implementation for the US Army Corps of Engineers and US military service components. He is the product manager for Image Matters’ new eXperience Reality product, featuring rich, mixed reality experiences for users on the move. He has First Responder experience on a wildfire Initial Attack crew deployed from helicopters

"We operate with a high level of social responsibility and bring this mindset to the office every day. We cherish the opportunity to make our world a safer, healthier place to live."

James Stephens

Director of Business Strategy and Development

Mr. Stephens has wide-ranging experience in analytic processes; technology application; research and development; program management; technical writing; plus business strategy, development, and capture. He serves as Image Matters’ Director of Business Strategy and Development. In that role, Mr. Stephens oversees how we align our pursuits across the entire business, identifies our key markets and opportunities, manages the capture process, and coordinates our customer engagement. Before his time with Image Matters, he served as a technology officer with Lockheed Martin. He engaged with key stakeholders in the customer space, Lockheed Martin corporate, and partner companies to promote game-changing capabilities. Mr. Stephens is a recognized expert on geospatial standards, having served as a US delegate to ISO TC/211 and as Lockheed Martin’s technical representative to the OGC.

"We focus on and invest in delivering future-oriented technology that advances how our customers work. This emphasis distinguishes us as a disruptive player in the market."