Social Software Use in the Intelligence Community: Interview with Mr. Chris Rasmussen

Check out the interview with Mr. Chris Rasmussen of NGA on emarv’s blog, discussing the Intelligence Community’s use of social software tools, such as their wiki, Intellipedia. It’s worth your time!

DNI Releases 500 Day Plan

The post at “Organization Theory and Collaboration” gives a good synopsis of the Director of National Intelligence’s new intelligence community-wide “500 Day Plan for Integration and Collaboration.” The blog lists the six core objectives laid out in the plan, each with a number of enabling initiatives which are designed to propel the transformation.

My Interview with Executive Biz

I did an “executive spotlight” interview with Executive Biz October 11, 2007. See here for my interview on Web 2.0 and the future of Intellipedia.

Regarding a post at “All News, All About Intellipedia”

I came across a post at “All News, All About Intellipedia” by eMarv, and he had an interesting quote from the MAZZ-INT blog that said:

“IT tools don’t naturally lead to collaboration or intelligence sharing…get the tools…to transform analysis through collaboration and intelligence sharing in place quickly, but do not expect this behavior to be commonplace until the community leadership models it, values it, incentivizes it.”

I certainly agree that technology is not a sufficient condition for collaboration to take place. The fundamental reality is collaboration is more about behavior than technology. Having said that, it is also a myth that collaboration is not about technology. Clearly technology makes forms of collaboration and capabilities possible that would not be without technology. For example, the concept of Network Centric Warfare, whereby a competitive warfighting advantage is gained by robustly networking geographically dispersed sensors, shooters, and decisonmakers, allows new forms of organizational behaviors to take place, all of which would be impossible without information technology. Why? The enabler is technology which allows networking. Networking enhances information sharing. Information sharing improves quality of information and provides shared situational awareness. Shared situational awareness enables collaboration, self-synchronization, and speed of command, and thus, translates into mission effectiveness.

On the whole, there are very few senior leaders who “walk the walk” when it comes to collaboration or using these new tools which advocate a flatter world. Unfortunately, in order for this new paradigm to expand throughout the government, it will take today’s users to become tomorrow’s leaders.

Emarv asked, “What is going to be different about this time around?”

Great question. This time around will be and already is different. We now have the structures in place to ensure the community’s communication systems are compatible and service-oriented architecture is integrated across organizational boundaries. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is streamlining the community’s classification guidelines, and standardizing control mechanisms which will allow the community to share information back and forth easily. ODNI is also working on altering policies and removing impediments which discouraged information sharing. Michael McConnell’s 500-Day plan intends to write collaboration into analysts’ performance appraisals. Given these movements, I believe this time will be different, and we owe it to the government for creating an office which sits above the community, and can ensure it acts like a true enterprise. I just hope DNI has the authority to actually execute its charter, because there is going to be a lot of resistance from agencies which are housed in other department’s and chain of commands. But Congress is eager to make this work. And so are the American people.