Managing Information as an Enterprise

"I thank you for the trouble you have taken in forwarding the intelligence which was enclosed in your Letter of 11th of March. It is by comparing a variety of information, we are frequently enabled to investigate facts, which were so intricate or hidden, that no single clue could have led to the knowledge of them in this point of view, intelligence becomes interesting which but from its connection and collateral circumstances, would not be important."

General George Washington

Letter to James Lovell

1 April 1782

"The unqualified importance of information will not change in 2010. What will differ is the increased access to information and improvements in the speed and accuracy of prioritizing and transferring data brought about by advances in technology. While the friction and the fog of war can never be eliminated, new technology promises to mitigate their impact."

Joint Vision 2010

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

A Virtual Collaborative Intelligence Environment

The national intelligence enterprise of the 21st Century must provide the knowledge needed by its customers, wherever they are, to enable the decisions they must make and the actions they must take.

"The possession of facts is knowledge,
the use of them is wisdom."

-Thomas Jefferson

Outlined herein are relevant considerations, planning factors and guiding principles for an evolutionary strategy to support future program decisions. The Community has produced a strategic plan for information systems that applies those principles to guide information technology investments and enable the nation's Intelligence Community to become more efficient, effective, and agile.

In an increasingly chaotic international environment, doing nothing is not an option. If the Intelligence Community fails to adapt to the realities outlined, it risks becoming obsolete.

Preface

Our Challenge

Managing Information Support to Our Missions

Support to National Policymakers

Support to Military Planning and Operations

Support to Law Enforcement

Support to Counter Foreign Intelligence Activities

Potential Mission-Support Scenarios of the Future

Additional Challenge of a Dynamic Environment

Rapidly Emerging Technology

Information Explosion

Declining Resources

Unstable Geopolitical Environment

National Security Shifts

The Changing Role of Government

Turning a Challenge Into an Opportunity

Becoming a More Agile Enterprise

Enabling Components of an Agile Enterprise

Distributed Collaboration

Information Service Capabilities

A Common Telecommunications Infrastructure

An Integrated Information Space

Facing the Challenge-Seizing the Opportunity

Manage our Information as a Critical Community Resource

Exploit the Opportunities Offered by Information Technology

Invest More Prudently in Information Technology

Conclusion

Preface

Our Challenge...

Though many in the Community recognize the need for and potential value of a worldwide virtual intelligence environment capable of efficiently and dynamically exploiting the rich information resources of the Intelligence Community; and though many are aware of the powerful potential capabilities offered by information technologies to be available at the dawn of the 21st Century; not all have acknowledged and made the commitment implied by the necessity of evolving separate components of the Community to an integrated enterprise capable of realizing the potential and capitalizing on the opportunities emerging.

Characterizations of the missions and functions performed by the Intelligence Community vary. Four principal missions have been identified and will be addressed in this discussion. In reality, these missions often overlap, and include common areas of information interests. The four Intelligence Community missions, as stated by the former Director of Central Intelligence, are: to provide intelligence support to national level policymakers, provide intelligence support to military planning and operations, provide intelligence support to law enforcement, and counter foreign intelligence activities.

Their wide diversity demands an equally wide diversity of adaptive intelligence processes, sources, and methods. The complexity of today's world and the interaction among nations and subcultures make it imperative that we adopt a flexible network of intelligence information collection, analysis, retrieval, and reporting. The nation can- not afford to trap potentially critical intelligence information and knowledge in narrowly defined organizational channels. The response times needed for decisive action are becoming too short, and the potential relevance of information collected in one mission area to other mission areas is too great not to be effectively and efficiently shared across the intelligence enterprise.

"The United States intelligence effort shall provide the President and the National Security Council with the necessary information on which to base decisions concerning the conduct and development of foreign, defense, and economic policy and the protection of the United States national interests from foreign security threats. Specifically, the missions of U.S. intelligence are to:

• provide intelligence support to national level policymakers,

• provide intelligence support to military planning and operations,

• provide intelligence support to law enforcement, and

• counter foreign intelligence activities."

John Deutch, Former Director of Central Intelligence

Support to National Policymakers

Economic intelligence will play an increasingly important role in helping policymakers understand trends, threats to U.S. economic interests from foreign intelligence entities, and unfair trading practices. Intelligence must also identify emerging threats that could affect the international economy and the stability of nation states, such as the upsurge in international organized crime and illegal trafficking in narcotics.

The development and implementation of policies to promote democracy abroad rely on sound intelligence support. In order to adequately forecast dangers to democracy abroad, the Intelligence Community and the policymakers it supports must track political, economic, environmental, social, proliferation and other military developments in those parts of the world where our interests are most heavily engaged and where collection of information from open sources is inadequate. This contributes to early warning of potential crises and facilitates preventive diplomacy.

Congressional legislators also benefit from intelligence gathered in support of the above priorities and use it in formulating national legislation, influencing the execution of foreign policy, and structuring the national defense. In some circumstances, our intelligence is shared with policymakers at international organizations when such sharing is consistent with our national objectives.

The implications of the broad range of intelligence information needed to support policymakers place a premium on the ability to look within and across national boundaries at any given region in the world, and to select and integrate information needed to capture the situation at a level of depth and trust sufficient to support prudent decision making. Extensive and rapid cross-community collaboration and all source information fusion are critical.

Although policymakers require access to many forms of intelligence, there are some key considerations regarding information content and structure, availability, timeliness, and presentation. policymakers generally prefer all-source products to ensure credibility and a balanced perspective. Information must be presented in context with the issues of daily concern, and it must be accurate, in a form easily understood, and conveniently available when and where desired. Finally, presentation format needs vary as a function of personal preference. Some individuals prefer personal briefings, others read specialized products and others routinely browse through Intelink-sources.

Support to Military Planning and Operations

Even in peacetime, our forces engage in many activities vital to our security, some of which place unique and stressing demands on our intelligence capabilities. Detecting the development, testing, and use of advanced weapons and covert activities throughout the world is a vital, day-in, day-out activity that requires highly sensitive, adaptive, and responsive intelligence capabilities, information, and information services.

• "The United States must be prepared for a wide range of contingency operations in support of U.S. interests. These operations include, among others, smaller-scale combat operations, multilateral peace operations, non-combatant evacuations, and humanitarian and disaster-relief operations.

• U.S. forces must be forward deployed or stationed in key overseas regions in peacetime to deter aggression,

• U.S. forces must be able to offset the military power of regional states with interests opposed to those of the United States and its allies. To do this, the United States must be able to credibly deter, and, if required, decisively defeat aggression, in concert with regional allies, by projecting and sustaining U.S. power in two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts (MRCs)."

As indicated by the figure above, as the disparate nature of military engagements varies widely across the crisis spectrum, the nature of intelligence information required varies markedly in area coverage, timeliness, resolution, context, presentation, and other parameters. What may not be so obvious are the somewhat dramatic shifts in the nature of intelligence information demands as a particular crisis progresses from one stage to another.

Support to Law Enforcement

The Intelligence Community provides information to support law enforcement, particularly concerning transnational activities that threaten U.S. interests. Chief among these activities are terrorism, narcotics trafficking, proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, and international organized crime. Intelligence regarding these and related areas of concern is needed to support diplomatic activities, to support international and domestic law enforcement efforts to prevent and prosecute illicit transnational activities, to assist foreign nations in controlling such activities within their borders, and, occasionally, to form the basis for appropriate military actions. Intelligence is also provided to criminal justice and regulatory agencies regarding foreign personnel or organizations located within our borders that are the subject of criminal investigation.

Terrorists, whether from well-organized groups or more loosely-organized groups, such as the one responsible for the World Trade Center bombing, have the advantage of being able to take the initiative in the timing and choice of targets. Countering terrorist activities requires, in particular, the coordinated efforts of the Departments of State, Justice and Defense, the FBI and the CIA. The coordination strategy must focus on the effective, timely integration of intelligence information, diplomatic and rule-of-law activities, and close cooperation with other governments and international counter-terrorist organizations.

International criminal enterprises are presently moving vast sums of illegal gains through the international financial system with impunity. Our strategy to counter international organized crime focuses on undercutting the financial underpinnings of criminal enterprises, specifically, combating money laundering throughout the globe. This requires timely knowledge-based information products and services related to these illegal activities.

Finally, we seek to prevent additional countries from acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and will use the full range of our intelligence capabilities to detect such activities. However, should such efforts fail, our forces must be prepared to deter, prevent and defend against their use. The United States is placing a high priority on improving the ability to locate, identify, and disable arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, production and storage facilities for such weapons, and their delivery systems. This requires knowledge obtainable from analysis of information from a wide variety of sources.

Law enforcement personnel prefer information products of immediate value providing knowledge regarding on-going investigations. The intelligence information must be accurate, easily understood, and sanitized to an unclassified level, if possible, to minimize obstacles presented by information handling and disclosure requirements. Intelligence information must also be conveniently available when and where desired-it must easily accommodate the rapid-reactive nature of criminal investigations.

Support to Counter Foreign Intelligence Activities

Today, foreign countries are shifting the focus of their efforts to acquire sensitive information regarding U.S. capabilities from the traditional defense-related efforts characteristic of the Cold War. This is leading to expanded, focused attacks on economic and technological information associated with terrorism and related hostile information operations in the modern era. Some of these countries have been considered ideological and military adversaries for decades. Their targeting of our economic and technological information is not new but has continued and expanded. Others are either longtime allies of the United States or have traditionally been neutral. Elements of apparently friendly countries may target our economic and technological information despite their generally friendly posture. In some cases, they may take advantage of their legitimate access to our facilities and collect sensitive information more easily than our military adversaries. Some countries have infrastructures that allow them to easily exploit high-tech information and use it to compete against our commercial firms. Adversaries seldom use one method in isolation but combine them into concerted collection programs. These collection programs encompass traditional espionage methods primarily reserved for collecting national defense information as well as other methods typical of industrial espionage, including tasking foreign students studying in our universities, debriefing foreign visitors, making contacts during international conferences and Trade Fairs, and accessing commercial databases.

Counter intelligence is an observation-driven process-interdiction involves rapidly reacting to data regarding organizations, people, the activities that bring them together, and the locations and environments within which the activities occur. Thus, counter intelligence personnel must have information from many diverse sources that can be readily searched and accessed, even though they cannot predict which data item (the search basis) may be the most important at a given time.

Potential Mission-Support Scenarios of the Future

During a period of heightened world tensions, Ray receives an emergency alert from intelligent intrusion-detection software agents about an attack from cyberspace on an important database providing critical intelligence to deployed U.S. and coalition forces. He and his emergency response colleagues at the other affected locations immediately begin a desktop video conference to share information about the attack, review damage assessments, and formulate a recovery plan.

Meanwhile, after identifying the site's firewall as the point of attack, the agents automatically reconfigure the firewall to cut off the attacker's access and report back to the emergency response team. An attack profile analysis agent is then launched to analyze the nature of the attack and determine who the perpetrator might be based on electronic "fingerprint" evidence left behind...

Bob was asleep when the call came from Kathy. The instructions were brief and to the point. "Find out all you can about the current refugee status in Zawalu." Bob starts to work. Bob loves working-because Bob isn't human. Bob is a piece of intelligent software called an agent.

Because of the general nature of the request, Bob calls an information mediator, another software agent that knows where the right information might be. The mediator then launches a series of multimedia search agents to search appropriate databases and work with specific search engines, performing semantic and syntactic translations as necessary. As results come in, Bob filters out information that he knows is duplicative or tangential. He employs the latest analytical tools to corrrelate the information and present it in a form that Kathy can readily understand, highlighting patterns and relationships in the information that she might otherwise overlook. Bob then goes dormant awaiting Kathy's next request...

Maj. Thomas is monitoring the demilitarized zone border between North and South Ranolea. Due to recent reports indicating a sudden increase in civilian refugee flow, he decides to task open source and national assets for a current imagery scan of the entire border. The resulting imagery contains a large suspicious object that he can't identify.

He launches several automated directory service agents to locate analysts who can participate in an immediate telepresence conference. Very soon he is "seated" at a virtual conference table with Capt.Clark and Maj. Masters, acknowledged experts in the field. The group, who appear to be in the same room together, view the object simultaneously on the shared, high-resolution, large-screen whiteboard. Maj. Masters says it looks like massive tents constructed for shelter after a devastating tidal wave a few years ago in Galdelor. As a result, Maj. Thomas modifies his tasking to take another look...

Irena has been monitoring Gulebonia for seven long years. Because Gulebonia is considered a low intelligence priority, few resources are devoted to its coverage. However, Irena continues to monitor it along with several other higher priority areas because her agency is aware that in the current unpredictable world climate, Gulebonia could quickly become tomorrow's problem. She is assisted in this task by a dozen or more constantly active software search agents whose job it is to work in the background building standardized country files.

Suddenly, with an invasion of the Syrinoco Embassy by Gulebonian revolutionary terrorists and the taking of over 100 foreign hostages, international interest in Gulebonia explodes. Irena joins a crisis team consisting of experts from across the Community. The information she has collected and the knowledge she has gained over the years, along with her network of contacts, significantly contribute
to the team's work. The U.S. initiates a plan for direct support to Gulebonian government...

Additional Challenge of a Dynamic Environment...

"We find that the vast majority of people who work in the IC are extremely dedicated to their work and to its value to our national security. The system within which they work, however, is not designed to get the very best out of them in terms of either bureaucratic rules or the type of leadership (rather than management) that breeds lean. Curiously, the IC tends to manage personnel much like it manages collection, through an array of 'stovepipes' that are bundled together but are not well inter-connected."

House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence: IC21

"It is the sense of Congress that, during the next five-year period beginning with 1996, executive agencies should achieve each year at least a 5 percent decrease in the cost (in constant fiscal year 1996 dollars) that is incurred by the agency for operating and maintaining information technology, and each year a 5 percent increase in the efficiency of the agency operations, by reason of improvements in information resources management by the agency."

Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996

It is clear that the Congress holds great faith in the utility of information technology in achieving overall improvements in Federal programs. It also recognizes the value of digital networking and collaborative technologies in supporting electronic commerce and other Government functions overall. The ever-increasing importance of the role of information management in the operations of the agencies has been recognized across the Federal Government. Recent legislation has established a pilot approach to creating, implementing, and assessing the value of information and the challenges associated with managing information resources. The Intelligence Community is pursuing a similar experimental and collaborative approach as we collectively learn how to become more effective managers of our information, information services, information systems, and related resources.

Rapidly Emerging Technology

Information Explosion

The reality of steadily decreasing budgets, staff downsizing, and facility shutdowns and consolidations is a way of life we are all too familiar with. "Doing more with less" is probably a part of more corporate vision statements than any other phrase. New technology and better infrastructure capabilities and tools certainly will help us do the things we've always done a bit more expediently; however, unless we realize that we are all components of a common enterprise, with complementary skills and products, then we will not gain the truly appreciable benefits and economies available through an integrated information infrastructure space. Unless we carefully examine and re-engineer our fundamental business processes in context with increased Community collaboration through enabling technologies, our mission customers will surely suffer the impact.

Unstable Geopolitical Environment

The world today is characterized by much uncertainty with respect to potential threats to our national security. Acts of terrorism are no longer restricted to foreign soil, and those organizations and individuals who pose this type of threat are extremely difficult to identify in advance. Maneuverable targets present a formidable challenge to our ability to locate, identify, and predict. If our Intelligence information management capabilities do not adequately cover future contingencies (including terrorism and hostile information operations), and if they are not agile and quickly adaptive to new, unpredicted situations, then our ability to respond to unforeseen circumstances and threats to our security will be at risk.

National Security Shifts

Since the end of the Cold War, our nation has been adapting its security strategies and policies to meet new and emerging threats, growing partnerships with free-world allies, and opportunities to help spread democracy and to provide humanitarian assistance where the needs arise. The ability to be responsive depends heavily on the timely and agile support of the Intelligence Community. Success also depends on our ability to collaborate not only within our own Community, but also with DoD, other Federal institutions and those of foreign nations. Without prudent and adaptive risk management policies and practices in place, we run the risk of either blocking critical information access to our Community partners, or, conversely, we increase the risk of providing sensitive information to today's friends who are potentially tomorrow's foes.

The Changing Role of Government

The Federal legislative and regulatory environment has changed significantly over the past few years in several areas that impact information management and information technology application in the agencies of the Federal Government.

The legislation does establish some common objectives for information management across the Federal Government. These include establishing personal accountability for achieving Government program results, adopting common best practices, using commercial technology wherever feasible, and integrating agency business strategic plans with agency performance improvements, program budgets, information technology plans, and information infrastructure architectures. Selected aspects of relevant recent legislation are highlighted below:

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (PRA) was enacted to make Federal agencies more responsible and publicly accountable for reducing the burden of Federal paperwork on the public. While the focus of the PRA is on public information and record keeping, the goals and principles of information resources management clearly apply to the information-related activities of Intelligence Community component organizations.

Turning a Challenge Into an Opportunity...

We are living in an age where information, and the knowledge derived from it, is becoming vital to the successful conduct of our daily affairs, from the most mundane to the most critical. Information has become integral to all activities. In the factory, the office, and the home, information technology is the key to making better decisions and getting results. In this information age in which we live, the power of information multiplies the effect of all other resources. Industries and nations are seizing the opportunities offered by information management and information technology to become more competitive in the global environment. Information must, therefore, be recognized as the core critical resource of the Intelligence Community, a resource which we must manage prudently.

The advent of hypertext-linked "web" technology combined with the global network of networks known as the Internet have made a wide variety of multimedia information available. Users all over the world have almost instant access to a great variety of widely distributed information. This technology, providing access to enormous quantities of data and information, has been incorporated into and supports the business process of the Intelligence Community. Whether we will be overloaded by information or will control the information to provide knowledge needed for strategic and tactical advantage depends on development of sound information management practices and capabilities.

Intelligence consumers throughout the world continue to face new, increasingly complex and short-fused challenges. The Intelligence Community's ability to respond to these challenges, shoulder to shoulder with those consumers, requires a commitment to understand them. We must acquire all information available that contributes the knowledge they need to support effective decisions and we must deliver that properly formatted information on time and in the context of those decisions. But in doing this, we must maintain an adaptive posture and strategy enabling us to rapidly detect and respond to unforeseen challenges ahead. In short, our challenge is to seize the opportunity to become a more agile enterprise.

Becoming a More Agile Enterprise...

"The agile enterprise provides solutions to its customers, not just products. It works adaptively, responding to marketplace opportunities by reconfiguring its organization of work, its exploitation of technology, its use of alliances. It engages in intensive collaboration within the company, pulling together all of the resources that are necessary to produce profitable products and services regardless of where they may be distributed. And it forms alliances with suppliers, with customers, and with partnering companies. And finally it is a knowledge-driven enterprise. The agile company is centered on people and information, not on technology alone, on people using technology in creative ways."

"Intelligence is a scarce resource... Demand consistently outstrips supply. In the industrial world, the two approaches that have evolved to cope with this challenge are top-down central planning and bottom-up consumer-driven free markets...The waste and inefficiency of central planning can no longer be tolerated. Cost-effective intelligence support under the National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement requires the resiliency and the discipline of the marketplace...Classical economic theory says that consumers would buy those products that give them what they need for the least cost. The concept of intelligence 'value' is born. Intelligence consumers could buy products off the shelf or have them tailor made. Inefficient producers would eventually be forced to improve or leave the market."

Todd Brethauer, Adam Smith
Examine the Intelligence Economy

The agile enterprise concept is based on the precept that business processes and procedures should serve the enterprise, and not the reverse. In order to remain competitive and viable in an increasingly competitive global environment, it is imperative for businesses (and intelligence organizations) to understand that they need to operate efficiently and effectively, providing their customer base with the products and services they need to carry out their missions and functions. A successful enterprise takes advantage of what the commercial marketplace has to offer. Those organizations that don't collaborate and don't form alliances may find themselves increasingly isolated. As intelligence organizations, we must also collaborate and interoperate across the broad spectrum of the larger Intelligence Community in order to provide the best information products and services on time, at the best price.

The agile enterprise concept is easily adaptable to the Intelligence Community. Just as the agile enterprise focuses on smaller, complementary, and reconfigurable areas of manufacturing expertise, the agile intelligence enterprise focuses on a high degree of collaboration across components of the Intelligence Community to produce knowledge products. The ability to "reconfigure" on demand to meet the needs of customers involves not only agility in adapting community roles and alliances "on the spot" to meet current needs, but also agility in reconfiguring, interrelating, and integrating information resources of the Community to provide the knowledge needed by those customers

The more agile intelligence enterprise envisioned for the future, will manage information as a critical corporate resource and is readily share it across the enterprise and with its customers. If the Community cannot provide the right information to the right people at the right time and in useful form and context, our customers will suffer and be forced to seek other sources to obtain the knowledge required for their decisions and actions. In fact, with the breathtaking growth of the Internet and the quantity and quality of open source information becoming available, intelligence consumers are exploring these resources directly, as well as our products. It is not a coincidence that CNN is a ubiquitous fixture in many intelligence watch facilities and operations centers.

The Joint Staff's Joint Vision 2010 describes the need for "information superiority," defined as "the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary's ability to do the same." The need for information superiority is vital to our nation. An efficient and cost-effective way to ensure that we provide superior information will evolve from a more agile enterprise centered on skilled knowledge workers and collaboration as an information "marketplace," where intelligence suppliers and customers conduct the exchange of information products and services. Customers require timely and accurate information; suppliers require feedback on the knowledge that customers need so that high quality information contributing to that knowledge can be provided in the most efficient, cost-effective, and trustworthy manner.

Where appropriate, competition among information providers must be encouraged as a means of continually improving information resources and services. Value-added providers who do not keep their services up to date and relevant to customers needs, or who do not form strategic and ad-hoc collaborative alliances, may find their business eroding over time, as customers move on to other, more efficient and responsive, sources of information and services. Provider cooperatives who are meeting customers' needs will naturally want to continue to invest in improved information sources, technology, and expertise that provide mutual benefit as they adapt their business or functional processes to capitalize on and exploit these improved resources.

The "information marketplace" must not become a "free market" without constraints, controls, or cooperation. Common information will be needed by all, and provided from common sources. Furthermore, cooperative planning and funding (or "subsidizing") is necessary to ensure that adequate global coverage is applied to potential "hot spots," not just focusing on those areas that are current "best sellers."

An information marketplace is not a system. It is a perspective or framework for thinking about our information resources and discovering the expertise, tools, techniques, policies, and procedures for managing these resources. To establish and maintain a healthy and productive marketplace we must expedite progress in establishing a shared electronic intelligence information space that builds upon and expands beyond the current Intelink environment. Viewing this emerging environment as an intelligence information marketplace in concept can be helpful as we rapidly evolve toward a more agile intelligence enterprise.

Joint Vision 2010 makes this very point: "...The unqualified importance of information will not change in 2010. What will differ is the increased access to information and improvements in the speed and accuracy of prioritizing and transferring data brought about by advances in technology. While the friction and fog of war can never be eliminated, new technology promises to mitigate their impact."

The tools and technologies needed for acquiring, analyzing, manipulating, storing, searching, retrieving, transmitting, and publishing information are increasing in speed and capacity, and steadily decreasing in cost. Available communications bandwidth of fiber and wireless systems is dramatically improving the ability to rapidly share information among analysts and processing facilities. Networking technologies are rapidly emerging, making it easier for us to access Community and other information regardless of location.

Nevertheless, even with the expanding potential that technology provides to shower intelligence consumers with information, that must not be our goal. Instead, we must develop and apply information management principles, policies, techniques, and procedures to reduce the volume and increase the timeliness and quality of knowledge-based information delivered. A set of principles to guide it on the proper course are proposed below in Table 2.

Enabling Components of an Agile Enterprise...

Agility across an enterprise depends upon closely interrelated and synchronized components: distributed collaborative processes, a common telecommunications infrastructure, shared information service capabilities, and an integrated information space. Each of these is a critical dimension or facet of an agile enterprise, and all are intimately interrelated and dependent upon each other.

A major step toward exploiting information as an enterprise is overcoming barriers related to a combination of policy and regulations (not always easy to change), business practices ("but we've always done it this way",) and, most importantly, culture. This isn't just a matter for debate among managers and policymakers. The entire enterprise workforce, including technology and knowledge workers, is an integral part of the equation. Culture influences policy and policy reflects the culture, and both of these can make it difficult to implement optimal technical solutions.

In addition to modifying policies and procedures over time, positive mechanisms are needed to promote information sharing across the Community, on an individual and on an organizational level. In the traditional environment the tendency is for an organization to focus on direct support to a specific customer base. Information sharing is often viewed as a serendipitous occurrence, not something explicitly planned. Therefore, many times this sharing is awkward or technically hard to achieve and goes awry. Further, there may be no incentive for information providers to make their products known to other potential customers and all the work falls on the customer to search for and pull information from potentially useful sources. Thus, a new paradigm for rewarding organizations for populating the information space (or stocking the marketplace) needs to be instituted.

Policies that have been in place for many years need to be reevaluated to determine whether they help or hinder information sharing and collaborating. Some policies are legally binding statutes that cannot be easily changed. Others are procedural. Still others are both cultural and rooted in the technology or paradigms of the past. One such example is the entire area of security policies. Recent movements toward risk management versus risk avoidance will help us achieve greater information sharing and interoperability, but create vulnerabilities that may not be clearly understood. How best to strike a balance in these policies is a difficult issue that must be resolved in ways suppliers and customers understand and endorse.

Information Service Capabilities

Though we already have many of these to some degree, the rapid pace of technology development is enabling improvements both in terms of robustness and functionality. As opportunities arise, we must reexamine the way we do business, both within individual organizations and across the enterprise, making adjustments as necessary to ensure that new capabilities are exploited to their best advantage. We must also be constantly alert for new technologies that have the potential to alter our processes significantly and exploit opportunities for improving the way we support our missions.

A Common Telecommunications Infrastructure

An agile enterprise needs a robust telecommunications infrastructure with assured availability, guaranteed quality of service, architectural scalability and, affordability, and the capacity to support for a whole host of emerging information service requirements.

Most users today cannot be certain that bandwidth will be provided where and when it is needed, or, in some circumstances, in a form that is technically compatible with their equipment. The problem is particularly acute outside of the continental United States, particularly in the Third World and war-torn environments, where commercial coverage and performance are often inadequate. As a result, connectivity from national sources and services to deployed (remote) operations must be improved.

Currently available telecommunications services are somewhat scaleable and flexible, but end-to-end interoperability problems exist, networks are difficult to expand or reconfigure, and there is limited means to reallocate bandwidth among users and functions (e.g., among video, data, and voice services). The current ability of the telecommunications infrastructure to support the growing information system services such as collaboration and teleconferencing, distributed database access and retrieval, electronic mail, facsimile, graphics and map transfer, imagery dissemination, office automation, remote terminal support, video broadcast, voice, wireless, and web services, varies widely today.

Clearly, the agile enterprise will need a variety of robust, bandwidth-on-demand communications services, from terrestrial to satellite, including wireless solutions, to be able to meet the demands that will be placed on it by an information sharing and collaborating user base.

An Integrated Information Space

However, a more open, shared and adaptive information environment supports the enterprise by providing access to information spaces and sources far removed from traditional Community information stores. An enterprise member may consult an ever widening circle of information domains starting with the tightly controlled, well regulated information stores of the enterprise, and growing out into the Internet at large, and foreign, private, government, and commercial information spaces.

As we move outward into a broader Government-wide information space and into other jurisdictions (e.g., coalition forces) including the entirety of the Internet, we have increasingly less control over the information or the information services. While this means that we might not realize the benefits of well regulated information and metadata in some parts of the information space, the enterprise will have access to a much greater and richer set of information resources.

We must, therefore, establish the capability to optimize our local spaces while ensuring that we take advantage of the wide variety of information available in the world wide information market. To do this, we must ensure that our business processes and our procedures remain agile enough to permit us the flexibility to do both. We also must not inadvertently impose standards or procedures that either take us out of the mainstream or prevent us from interoperating with the larger world. Authorities and interagency bodies must have the flexibility to revise and update standards and procedures, as needed, to keep pace with the wider environment.

"The status quo approach to information management-invest in new technologies, period-just doesn't work. Instead, managers need a holistic perspective, one that can weather sudden business shifts and adapt to ever-changeable social realities. This new approach, which I call information ecology, emphasizes an organization's entire information environment."

Thomas H. Davenport,

Director (with Laurence Prusak)

Information Management Program,

University of Texas

Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment, 1997

Facing the Challenge-Seizing the Opportunity...

Sound intelligence collection, analysis, and reporting have long-contributed to the nation's security and economic well-being. Accurate, detailed, and comprehensive intelligence was a significant factor in ending the Cold War and in winning the Gulf War. Continued intelligence production will be vital to averting the next war, or at least to minimizing the number of casualties in future conflicts. Also, extensive and precise foreign intelligence will be crucial to future diplomatic negotiations, economic planning, and treaty verification. Targeted intelligence will also be critical to law enforcement, fighting international organized crime, countering the terrorist threat, and waging a successful war on drugs. Moreover, intelligence will continue to prove useful in responding to natural disasters and protecting our environment.

Though the U.S. Intelligence Community is the best in the world, there is much work left to do to adapt to the new world order, a new millennium, and the shifting demands resulting from our new and evolving National strategies and priorities. We must respond to these challenges to our security and supremacy during a period of declining resources.

However, we share a collective vision for information and knowledge management with much of the industrial and commercial world from whom we can learn and benefit. In general, we envision a shared electronic, virtual information space, supported by a dynamic and robust "information marketplace," in which intelligence collectors, analysts, military and law enforcement operators, and policymakers all collaborate, interact, and share resources.

In seizing the opportunity, we must work closely together to pursue three broad objectives:

All three objectives must be pursued always in context with increasing the mission effectiveness of our customer base-the policymakers, our military commanders, the law enforcement agencies, and the counter intelligence community. Achieving these objectives will open up opportunities for new and improved ways of doing business, providing many more avenues for sharing, valuing, and managing intelligence information within our individual agencies and across the enterprise.

Manage Our Information as a Critical Community Resource...

To meet the challenge of shifting mission priorities while achieving our national security objectives, we must provide our mission customers with the intelligence information and knowledge they need, when and where needed, and in the context required to support the decisions to be made. To accomplish this, there is no question that we need to work more collaboratively than we have in the past as a unified, virtual intelligence enterprise. In doing so, to make our information accessible to those who need it and are authorized to view it, we must maintain the agility to tailor, combine, and adapt data and information from multiple sources and various forms into the context and presentation format that meet the immediate needs of the decisionmaker.

Our first objective should be for the Community (internally) to manage its information as its most critical resource for the benefit of its customers and the efficiency of its operations as an enterprise. This requires us to think a bit differently about the information we require, and the knowledge we enable, and how we a value it. In the past, we largely focused on information systems, which were considered major capital assets due to their expense and long lead-time to develop and acquire. This has changed not only with the accelerating pace of technological development and the rate at which today's systems become obsolete, but with the rapid decline in prices for systems. Today's systems are becoming commodities or consumables that require replacement or upgrade much more frequently than was the case in the past.

The value of this resource varies depending on its nature, use, and context. It is difficult to put a dollar value on information. In certain situations, information may be priceless (averting hostilities, saving lives, etc.). Some information depreciates quickly, while some has long-standing archival value. Some even appreciates over time and may have more or different value based on changed future circumstances. And, as other assets, information has a cost associated with acquisition, manipulating it, publishing it, storing it, accessing it, applying it, and providing it to others who need it. Like most capital resources, it must be secured against theft, tampering, misuse, corruption, and destruction.

In order to better manage information as a resource, we need to determine how best to apply information resource management concepts to the business of intelligence. This will involve gaining a better understanding of these concepts and weighing their advantages against their possible effect on our missions. We also need a better feeling for how an information marketplace might work in our environment, and what types of controls we would need to impose to ensure that we still have all the information we need as a Community to support each other and our customers. Cross-Community information management task forces (including mission-customer membership), senior level advocacy and steering groups, and pilot projects to test the concepts and assess the customer needs and commensurate enterprise capabilities offer opportunities that should be exploited.

We need not start "from scratch." We have an excellent start toward an agile and collaborative enterprise with the Intelink service, in operation since late 1994, and the tremendous progress being made to increase information agility and collaboration within individual organizations. We must exploit these collective accomplishments as a point of departure and test bed in which to examine whether and how we might devise a practical measure of information value which could be used to evaluate progress and to drive future acquisition and budget allocation decisions. Further-more, we must establish a common information inventory process that can be used within our respective environments, as well as across the enterprise. This inventory (architecture or information model) can help us identify and characterize our information resources. An information model can help us evolve toward a more agile enterprise and ensure that future, unknown information needs are met (e.g., global coverage of potential trouble spots).

In addition, policies, processes, and procedures need to be revisited and revised. For example, each of us will need to ensure that our organizational leadership interests, motivation processes and personnel incentives will encourage a culture of information sharing and collaboration. Policies will also need to determine when the results of a collaboration between analysts and customers become an official intelligence product. As organizational hierarchies are rendered less important by network-based information technology, we in the enterprise must address how and when authority and responsibility get redistributed. Similarly, security ground rules for what knowledge should or should not be shared must be reexamined.

Each organization must explore the new paradigm of providing ourselves and our customers with dynamic access to, reuse of, and repackaging of selected information holdings (e.g., fragments, data bases, or libraries) to provide the context tailored to the need at hand, instead of providing only "finished" intelligence products. While there will always be a place for finished intelligence products, we must recognize the burgeoning demand for rapid, yet prudent, access to pertinent knowledge fragments in support of fast-breaking situations. However, mere electronic access to vast data bases by customers is not a complete solution; we must determine where value-added analysis is necessary to achieve correct interpretation of the information by customers and provide linkages to appropriate analytic resources (e.g., analyst or expert names, manipulation and visualization software, or predictive models) to assist in that interpretation.

Collaboration is another area with substantial implications for our infrastructure, security, and management processes. While we install the infrastructure to provide the necessary connectivity services, we need to do more to address the integration of collaborative interaction with our "digital" resources. The collaborative model includes electronic knowledge sharing (such as via a network) as well as human-to-human communications (such as via telephones or video conferencing). Just as today, where there are sign-off requirements for release of an intelligence product, in the future, documented evidence of collaboration may be required prior to acceptance by customers of analytic conclusions; or at least such evidence may contribute to increasing their confidence in the validity of the intelligence product provided.

All institutions must advance to keep pace with the times or face extinction; the Intelligence Community is no exception. The principal objective must be to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. To succeed in the 21st Century, we must work together, collaboratively as an integrated enterprise, to optimize the value of the information we are providing, the agility in forming it into the context needed, and the accessibility of our products and services to those needing them.

Exploit the Opportunities Offered by Information Technology...

Our second objective ought to be to ensure that we cost-effectively exploit the opportunities offered by information technology. Information technology will be both a driver and a solution to our information and knowledge production needs. With technology advances, customers will expect more in terms of information products, access, and manipulation. Analysts will demand more from their information systems in terms of convenience of operation and exploitation of a wider variety of information sources (as well as support for distributed collaboration with customers and other analysts). And finally, all of us will need better tools to assess the validity
of information as we increase our use of open services and sources.

Convenient and affordable access to information technology outside the workplace will continue to raise our expectations and demand for similar capabilities in the office. The more technology that is available, the more we will use it; the more we use it, the more information and agility we can make available; and the more information and agility we make available, the more challenging will be the problem of managing the increasing volume of information to produce the knowledge needed by our customers.

As large amounts of communications bandwidth become increasingly affordable, the network will no longer be the bottleneck. It will one day be practical to get massive amounts of information all the way to the edges of the network (e.g., to the foxhole, or the cockpit, or the observation post). However, in the nearer term, the amount of information to be passed over this network will grow just as exponentially as the growth in bandwidth and processing technology. But, both now and then, we must take care to not flood our customers with information. We must manage information and deliver only knowledge needed by those customers.

Security, of course, will continue to be an extremely vital part of the information technology equation. The growing threat of hostile information operations against the Community as well as the entire national infrastructure is also causing us to enlarge our mission. Each step towards greater automation of our intelligence information resources must be taken in light of the risk of information warfare. Many new security capabilities are emerging from technology advances in the private sector, which are urgently needed and must be exploited to support our own security management infrastructure.

Change will continue to run rampant, not only in technology but in missions and targets, too, and the successful intelligence enterprise will be one which learns to be agile and keep up. We have witnessed the proliferation of Internet technology around the globe. This trend will continue, with more and more advanced information and networking technologies adopted by foreign nations, well-funded international crime syndicates and terrorists. In addition, in today's world, nations are leapfrogging whole generations of technology as they upgrade their internal infrastructures. Indeed, some countries are finding it easier and more cost-effective to skip laying twisted pair telephone wires and jump immediately to large scale implementation of cellular telephones. Some of these nations may be tomorrow's adversaries.

We cannot shy away from information technology and the constant upheaval caused by technological innovation; it is futile to try to "future-proof" our operations. Also, personnel costs (labor) are crowding out other cost categories of the intelligence enterprise. Commercial business is driving information technology, and we must continue to modernize our policies and procedures (such as evolutionary acquisition practices) to keep pace. We must continue to pursue the philosophy of applying commercial information technology wherever feasible.

Invest More Prudently in Information Technology...

Our third objective should be to establish and execute a plan for prudently investing in information technology across the enterprise to enable us to share information and better serve our customers. We must, individually and collectively, ensure prudent investments in information technology and people, both now and into the future. Information technology will be vital to the business of intelligence, as it will be for our customers in using the intelligence we provide.

Planning a comprehensive information technology strategy is the key to the cost-effective conduct of the intelligence business. Most Intelligence Community organizations already have an information technology strategic plan that identifies systems and services that will be provided, in concert with the management principles of the Clinger-Cohen Act. In addition, an Intelligence Community enterprise-wide information systems strategic plan is now being published.

Our information systems strategic planning must be driven by an understanding of the information technology marketplace (what capabilities will be available and which approaches and product-lines will survive). It must also be derived from an understanding of the information we have, its location, its form, its currency, and its intended use. Further, it must be consistent with a comprehensive information security model, yet to be developed, that defines rules, strategies, and degrees of freedom for entertaining candidate technologies and capabilities for our information and information management services.

Finally, our strategic planning process must be sensitive to some realities that could actually impede our progress as an integrated and interoperable enterprise as we move forward as individual components of the enterprise. For example, well-intentioned but non-coordinated decisions regarding the selection and implementation of available technology and services could adversely impact our ability to interoperate. Security standards are critical, particularly to dissuade agencies from resisting interoperability opportunities in the name of protecting sources and methods. Components who can afford to progress faster than others could create significant gaps in capability and interoperability. Thus, an essential element of our strategic plan should be a carefully constructed, well-coordinated, and often-revisited evolutionary transition strategy that defines incremental capability milestones and agreements. This will allow us to consider specific capabilities, implementation criteria, and opportunities for sharing across the Community, while maintaining backward compatibility with components operating at lower levels. Such an evolutionary
strategy is outlined by Figure 4.

Conclusion

The Intelligence Community faces turbulent times and many challenges ahead, yet times that afford more opportunities to excel than ever before. To thrive-or survive-and provide increasing value to our customers, we must interact more closely, share our information and knowledge, and help each other and our customers reach the best decisions possible, all while avoiding costly and unnecessary restarts, redundancies, and system incompatibilities. We must forge stronger ties with commercial industry and leverage their products and strengths. We must pay closer attention to the knowledge needed by our customers and structure our processes and systems to provide the products and the services to fulfill those needs in the most cost-effective manner. We must do an even better job of collecting the right data for analysis, and providing the right information in the right format and context to the right customers in time to be of real use.

Afterword

To achieve the agile collaborative enterprise that is our vision, we must become more agile as individuals, as agencies, and as a Community. We must establish and evolve a capacious and interoperable information infrastructure, within and among the intelligence agencies, one that supports collaboration and knowledge sharing among our members and our customers. We must learn to manage risk effectively, not avoid it. We must acquire, install, and operate systems that are driven by changing intelligence mission needs, and we must account for our resource expenditures in ways that can identify the value received for the resources expended. We must instill organizational and individual motivations and rewards that are consistent with our goals for greater sharing and working together. We must recognize the need to keep the knowledge-based skills of our workforce up-to-date and to provide each intelligence knowledge worker with timely feedback and an adequate understanding of the value of his or her contributions to the enormous and diverse intelligence enterprise. We need systems that are able to adjust to rapidly changing world conditions. We need innovative and adaptive staff able to identify and provide relevant and tailored intelligence knowledge products and services needed by our customers. Finally, we need organizations that are able to evolve in response to a highly dynamic, constantly changing provider-consumer intelligence knowledge marketplace.