16 August 2000
Source: http://www.ncsievents.com/joint/presentations/pres1.doc

Analytical Uses of Collaboration

Remarks by John C. Gannon

Assistant Director of Central Intelligence

for Analysis and Production

to the

Intelligence Community Collaboration/Knowledge Management & AIPA Conference and Exposition

2 May 2000

Thank you. I am delighted to be here with my colleague John Dahms, the IC CIO, in a beautiful location at just the right time to enjoy it, and to participate in a conference with A.I.P.A. on a topic that I believe is a top priority for the US Intelligence Community: analytic collaboration. As never before, the times demand it and technology enables it. And, I am glad to say, we are making progress as agencies and as a Community. Yet, I would stress that Community analysis continues to pay a heavy price for the fact that we cannot do better. John Dahms and I will tell you that we need to keep working hard to achieve our goals for interagency collaboration.

I will make four points today that I hope will print:

• First, the threat environment in which we work will continue to be characterized by diverse, complex issues and shifting priorities. We are in what I would call "a stressful cognitive environment" with no relief in sight. It makes sense for IC agencies to work together. It makes no sense to preserve stovepipes in this information age.

• Second, the technological revolution we are experiencing challenges the Intelligence Community as never before, but it also offers us the opportunity to deal more effectively with this new threat environment. Either, we harness technology, in my view, or our analysis will simply lose competitiveness and relevance in an increasingly technological world. The 11 agencies that comprise the National Intelligence Production Board (NIPB) are making significant progress within their organizations and with larger communities of interest. Today’s intelligence analysts are as comfortable in cyberspace as in the office space of top consumers. The Washington-based analyst today can send a message and get a response from a remote country faster than it used to take to exchange notes by pneumatic tube with counterparts in the same building.

• Third, establishing connectivity and collaboration across stovepipes has been much harder and progress has been significantly slower. But, John Dahms and I bring some encouraging news about the Community’s plans for connectivity, interoperable databases, and new analytic tools. That said, we know we have a long way to go to reach the collaborative standard that technology makes possible today.

• And fourth, the intelligence business is fundamentally about skills and expertise and this means people, people in whom we need to invest much more to deal with future challenges. No system or technology by themselves will enable us to master the new threat environment or the continuous flow of information that confronts us. The expertise and skills of people will matter more than ever in the years to come. I won’t talk so much about this day, but I cannot overstate its importance to our future. Technology is no substitute for human expertise.

Let me say a few words about the changing threat environment.

The world and the workplace of the CIA analyst have changed more in the past decade than in the previous 40 years of the Agency’s existence. The single strategic threat from the Soviet Union, a remarkably stable intelligence target throughout the Cold War, has gone and is not coming back. Threats to the United States today are more diverse and dispersed – distributed, if you will – and intelligence priorities shift continuously -- presenting a tougher environment for both collection and analysis.

The post-Cold War challenge has been increased by the revolution in information technology and telecommunications, which has fundamentally transformed the globe we cover, the service we provide consumers, and the workplace in which we function. Information abounds, though of varying quality, a lot of open-source material is relevant to our needs. Everybody is better informed. Intelligence requirements, as a result, tend to be sharper and more time sensitive. Everything moves faster! And Will Rogers’ advice still holds: "It isn’t good enough to be moving in the right direction. If you are not moving fast enough, you can still get run over!"

In the decade ahead, technology will challenge us in every area of the intelligence business to be smarter, more agile, more responsive to the policymakers we serve, and more collaborative with experts, wherever they may be found – in academia, the private sector, and non-governmental organization (NGOs). The center of gravity for expertise on both research & development, and many of the substantive issues we cover, has shifted outside the Intelligence Community in recent years. We need to be out there to get it.

Substantially, the good news is that governments will derive benefits from technology that moves information, goods, and services rapidly.

For some governments, the bad news is that they will have less and less capacity to control these flows unilaterally. International organized crime groups, terrorists, narcotraffickers, and proliferators, will take advantage of such technology as well, bypassing governments, or seeking to undermine them when governments try to block their efforts to run and expand their illegal activities.

This will raise the profile of transnational issues – such as counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counternarcotics -- that are already putting such heavy demands on intelligence collection and analysis.

In addition to traditional intelligence concerns—such as the future of Russia and China, political turmoil in Indonesia, and civil conflicts in Africa–– the new environment features many nontraditional missions such as peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, sanctions-monitoring, information warfare, threats to our space systems and combating international organized crime.

Many of these missions are operationally focused, requiring growing proportions of the analytic and collection workforce to function in a crisis, ad hoc mode.

We are entering a world, moreover, in which we all will have access to a single network. We must still deal with terrorists, insurgents, and others who have hundreds of years of history fueling their causes – but chances are they will be using laptop computers, establishing their own websites, and using sophisticated encryption, reconnaissance, and weaponry their predecessors could not even have imagined.

In the face of these challenges, John Dahms and I are equally committed to establishing a collaborative virtual workspace for the Intelligence Community. For now, it is a work in progress. Let me tell you where we are.

The collaborative virtual workforce would include three essential components: first, connectivity across IC agencies and between the IC and its customers; secondly, interoperable databases that are easy to access and use; thirdly, new analytic tools that allow analysts to organize the appropriate information and knowledge easily and quickly. I would like to say a few words about each.

CONNECTIVITY. The purpose of collaboration is to assemble the right expertise in a timely manner to provide the best analysis. The means to achieve this, according to the DCI’s Strategic Intent, is to "Deploy tools that will establish a shared, electronic working environment for all communities of interest … by taking advantage of software developed for the Internet and worldwide web (www)." Our intent is to create this virtual work environment by connecting desktops across the IC -- with appropriate security -- and by linking analysts to collectors, consumers, allies, and academic and industry experts.

Each intelligence agency, as I have said, is already aggressively developing collaborative processes and tools to help them work more effectively within their organizations and with larger communities of interest. Most technology they deploy is based on commercially available platforms and software, allowing them to migrate to an IC environment that is fully interoperable. The leaders of the individual programs are in contact regularly to share lessons learned.

Some tools and capabilities are already in operation and are creating the basis for Community-wide efforts. In 2003, we intend to set the standards and processes for IC-wide interoperability. A few examples of current programs:

• Intelink has a broad range of users, particularly in DoD. It has several collaborative tools – a limited e-mail capability and bulletin boards for posting finished intelligence, and a web-chat with synchronous capabilities.

• DIA and Defense Intelligence primarily participate in a collaborative tool development through the Joint Intelligence Virtual Architecture (JIVA) program. JIVA has implemented a Joint Collaboration Environment that includes synchronous tools such as chat, whiteboard, instant messaging, and shared applications to ten different communities of interest including a few in CIA for example, communities of interest on China Conventional Forces, Colombia, etc.

• CIA Live, providing synchronous collaborative capability, instant messaging, and awareness of who is on-line, across the Directorate of Intelligence and to some in the Directorate of Operations, will be deployed by the end of this year.

• NSA has the largest sustained user base on collaborative tools within the IC, with more than 3000 users for its Collaborative Virtual Workspace, deployed within NSA and to several other organizations. The NSA program links collectors, collection managers, analysts, translators, and those involved in the production process to shorten the intelligence production cycle and improve crisis support.

Over the past decade, the development and deployment of new technologies have allowed the Intelligence Community to facilitate limited secure information sharing among analysts in different organizations.

The Community has made a solid start in deploying collaborative tools, but it has a long way to go. It is still at the pilot stage of deployment even in the more advanced communities of interest, while most analysts have limited access to collaborative tools beyond Intelink. Of the analysts identified in a baseline study in April 1999, less than half have access to any collaborative environment, other than Intelink. Moreover, we are still struggling with how to address nagging cultural issues and with design of a roadmap to achieve Community-wide integration. Key security issues and rules of engagement still remain as major impediments to collaboration across the IC, let alone with allies or experts outside the IC.

DATABASE INTEROPERABILITY. The DCI Strategic Intent envisions the Community working collaboratively not only through better connectivity and tools but also through increased data-sharing. To provide the substantive information necessary to make collaboration work and improve the ability of analysts to access, share, and manipulate data, the analytical and production community is focusing on changing the way it holds and stores information.

The DCI’s Strategic Intent recommends that the Intelligence Community "Develop a data storage system that links the Community’s primary technical collection databases to the Community’s global communication system" and "Provide intelligence to customers faster with new digital products that permit data mining, customer ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ immediate customer feedback, and the ability to influence intelligence tasking requirements."

To attain these goals, we are examining the requirements for a community virtual database – a common knowledge and information base for the entire Community that provides secure, easy, and reliable access to all intelligence data at any time from any location. To achieve this, the Community will need to rethink fundamentally the way it stores and manages its information and square database access with security and the need-to-know principle. John Dahms and I are working on means to overcome these hurdles.

NEW ANALYTIC TOOLS. Analytic tools will be one of the most important and expensive areas for the analytical and production community. Without such tools, the shrinking analytic workforce will have no hope of managing the flood of new intelligence information or shifting smoothly from one crisis or issue area to another.

Several agencies have developed specialized search or analytical tools that work with databases to provide some visualization capabilities. CIA’s Surge Tool Kit, for example, will introduce commercial information retrieval systems to provide fast retrieval from massive free-text data collections and provide the capability quickly to identify relevant documents.

New analytical tools are just beginning to become broadly accessible. Many are being deployed within individual programs. In cases where they are put out on Intelink, as in the case of NSA’s WIRED, firewall/security problems are limiting their effectiveness or availability. Like collaborative tools and database efforts, these tools must be user friendly and not require extensive training.

Despite significant and creative efforts, the IC clearly has a long way to go before achieving the virtual, collaborative, inter-operable workplace we intend to create. In short, the NIPB organizations today have:

• Limited connectivity across the IC and with outside experts and allies;

• Simple search and retrieval tools and complicated stovepipe databases;

• Limited ability to share data and collaborate online;

• Limited ability to process and filter information and deal with non-English text; and

• Limited ability to retrieve past production, access the knowledge base, and update customers.

John Dahms and I are working to eliminate the current limitations – as well as grappling with the obstacles posed by institutional cultural issues. As a baseline study on collaboration I commissioned concludes, achieving our goal of a unified collaborative community will be particularly tough because of the institutional culture of the IC.

• The IC has a cultural tradition that impedes information sharing because agencies retain a stovepipe mentality and organizational competitiveness.

• Lack of trust in the personnel, policies, and systems of other agencies within the IC is widespread and pervasive.

• As a result, we have not yet developed a set of common goals for collaboration across the Community, a recognition of benefits resulting from collaboration, or a system of rewards to support it.

We are addressing the current limitations and the cultural obstacles through many specific efforts. The following three examples, among many others, will give you a sense of the extent of our effort.

• A study on collaboration best practices is nearing completion and will be briefed at this conference. The study explores how different collaborative pilot projects have addressed cultural issues. The best practices will be widely disseminated, posted on Intelink, and shared across the practitioner/user base. I will use these best practices to recognize and reward innovative and pioneering on-line collaboration efforts.

• We will be extending our pilot projects to test capabilities and expand cultural change. One pilot project in particular (JIVA), now used primarily by DIA and DI, will be extended to CIA and NSA. It will be the first experience of a truly cross-IC analytic effort, and we expect self-defining team projects to emerge.

• In addition, we are establishing a collaboration facilitation cell to develop a roadmap of specific practices to move from pilots to general deployment of tools that unify the analytic and production community. This cell will help us develop methodologies as well as track the gains achieved through collaborative projects.

Some concluding thoughts:

• Finding a way to absorb new technologies and capitalize on their productive potential may be the biggest challenge for the Community over the next decade.

• We will always have security concerns, and we must address them. But, we cannot allow those concerns to deter us from acknowledging the opportunities inherent in the emerging information environment. We are, at the end of the day, an information-based business that, in today’s threat environment, will spend more and more time chasing bad guys successfully by exploiting information-based technologies.

• As the heirs to the men and women who solved the secrets of the Enigma and who invented satellite reconnaissance, we need to put the technological future to work for us to maintain our edge as the best Intelligence Community in the world.

For most of our history, the Intelligence Community has operated as an industrial enterprise, with compartmentation as a key operating metaphor. We have created a set of impressive but inflexible organizations. Now we must adjust to a world in which networks defeat hierarchies, and in which agility is a prerequisite for organizational success.

We in the Intelligence Community need to commit ourselves to a corporate strategy that will leverage the best practices and resources of the whole government and the private sector to provide the President and US policymakers the information advantage they need in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world. We are fortunate in this great country to have talented and capable folks like you to help us.

Let me stop there and take your questions.

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