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Intelligence Community Embraces Virtual Collaboration

The nature of intelligence community activities has been changed as increasing numbers of people adopt virtual collaboration tools and methodologies. A host of systems unleashed a handful of years ago has burgeoned into a new way of engaging in intelligence operations that is moving through the community.

Users set free to explore these new cyberspace systems have uncovered new capabilities and have driven the introduction of still more collaborative systems. The result is that finished intelligence reports now are richer than before virtual collaboration was adopted. An issue is viewed through more than one perspective; and the overall effect is timelier, more agile and more accurate intelligence reporting to decision makers, says an intelligence official.

John E. Hale, chief of service delivery for intelligence community enterprise solutions in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Chief Information Officer (CIO), notes that when his office began to field virtual collaboration tools to intelligence community members, it did not provide a large amount of governance and guidance to the community. “We basically told them what they could and couldn’t do, but we didn’t necessarily tell them how they could use the tools to do their jobs,” he says. “We let the community as a whole decide the best way to use the capabilities to satisfy their mission.”

One prime example is Intellipedia (SIGNAL Magazine, October 2007, page 45). It is based on the same software package as the Internet’s Wikipedia online encyclopedia. But when Intellipedia was fielded, the intelligence community decided that it would not use it as an encyclopedia but instead as a place for live collaboration. Now, Intellipedia has more than 100,000 contributors across its domains.

 

This satellite image of Southern California wildfires was generated by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as a composite with descriptive overlays. Infrared hot spots that betrayed actual fires are highlighted in red. The NGA used new intelligence community virtual collaboration services to generate and distribute the images from its St. Louis facility to firefighters on the ground in the affected areas.

 

Intelligence virtual collaboration generates its best results with issues that transcend organizational boundaries, Hale warrants. This illustrates that the defining aspect for utility is not technical but cultural. This collaboration is finding its greatest adherents when bridging cultural barriers, not overcoming technical hurdles. Hale suggests that, because agency budgets tend to facilitate collaboration from within, agencies are gleaning benefits from virtual collaboration tools in common shared space that break down these barriers.

This revolution began in 2005 with the introduction of several collaboration services: Intellipedia, instant messaging across agency lines, a social bookmarking capability similar to del.icio.us, an enterprise search capability, and enterprise blogs. Most of these services are used widely across the entire community.

Hale says that reaching critical mass—the point at which a service has enough participation to make it attractive to new users—took some time for these early systems. It took a year to reach the first major milestones. But, over the past two years, participation has increased tenfold.

For example, community members have embraced blogging. Hale offers that the blogging realm is a self-policing community, so users only initiate blogs that will be considered relevant by their peers. It is very rare that any content needs to be removed, he adds.

One innovative use of intelligence virtual collaboration involved a domestic concern—California wildfires. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) generated composite imagery of these wildfires, which it then had to distribute to personnel on the ground. The NGA designed an entire system to generate these composite images in its St. Louis office and distribute them to California firefighters via the collaborative tools.

Most of the technological hurdles to virtual collaboration have been overcome, Hale says. The community contends with the same issues facing the commercial world—different browser versions, plug-ins and other mechanisms. Because the intelligence community comprises several agencies, many of those standards are established within individual agencies, and these differences must be overcome.

Hale states that the biggest hurdle has been cultural—convincing people to think topically rather than organizationally. “It’s a culture shift toward working in a shared space versus solely working in a vacuum.” His office has worked to overcome that hurdle by making the shared space as appealing and easy to use as possible.

With these new services receiving widespread acclaim and use, the community now has a wish list of new capabilities. One is for a Facebook or LinkedIn type of capability that would allow users to profile themselves and locate similar types of colleagues within the intelligence community.

Twitter is another capability that is generating a wishful buzz among intelligence professionals. This microblogging capability limits text length to 140 characters per post. So, a post tends to represent a single thought instead of a presentation.

The intelligence community would use a Twitter capability differently from the public’s social approach. An intelligence Twitter might take the place of instant messaging. Hale points out that Twitter allows the same type of communication as instant messaging, but it leaves a searchable record on the network, which instant messaging does not.

The intelligence community is opting to build its own versions of these popular capabilities for several reasons, the main one being physical data security. Hale observes that no one can state definitively where data will be stored. “Unless you have a specific agreement with that provider, you cannot guarantee where the data is going to reside, how the data is secured, or how the data is backed up,” he explains.

 

Read an expanded version of this article in the May 2009 issue of SIGNAL Magazine, in the mail to AFCEA members and subscribers May 1, 2009. For more information about purchasing this issue, joining AFCEA or subscribing to SIGNAL, contact AFCEA Member Services.