Vice Admiral Lowell Edwin Jacoby, USN (born 28 August 1945) was the 14th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He attended the University of Maryland and received a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in 1967 with a Major in Economics and a Minor in Government and Politics.

From 1975 to 1977 he attended the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, receiving a Master of Arts in National Security Affairs (With Distinction).

He was commissioned as an intelligence officer on 16 May 1969, and subsequently stayed at NAS Pensacola as a student at the Naval Air Basic Training Command through August of that year.

Subsequent operations focused on interdiction of supplies flowing into South Vietnam over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

Jacoby volunteered for duty in Saigon, Vietnam and joined Commander Seventh Fleet Detachment Charlie in June 1971 as the air intelligence officer.

He was also embarked in USS Iowa when the Turret Two main battery exploded with significant loss of life and the resultant decommissioning of the battleship.

In July 1989 Jacoby returned to Washington as the head of the Intelligence Assignment and Placement Branch at the Naval Military Personnel Command.

Jacoby was advocating increased funding for JITF-CT on the afternoon of 10 September 2001, with senior staff on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

During his tenure as Director of DIA, Jacoby initiated a dramatic improvement in the way the agency collected, shared and used the information its many components generated.

This seemingly innocuous statement, far afield from many similar efforts in the federal government, set DIA on a course toward the interoperability it needed, focusing on the information elements themselves, and avoiding the organizational resistance normally generated by technology mandates.

In the public sector where success in multi-organizational information sharing efforts has been rare, DIA succeeded, resulting in the 2007 opening of the Library of National Intelligence, growing at more than 20,000 XML documents per week.

DIA's efforts and Jacoby's foresight hold important lessons for all public sector organizations facing similar challenges.

Since leaving the Navy, Jacoby has continued to serve the intelligence community in the private sector as a senior executive for a large defense contractor; he lives and works in the Washington, D.C., area.