Information sharing boosted by recognizable tools

The Office of the Director for National Intelligence is making it easier to use Intellipedia, the wiki for the federal intelligence community.

Alex Voultepsis, ODNI's chief of the enterprise services division, says Intellipedia now offers an editing tool to make posting information much easier.

ODNI launched the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool March 8 after adopting it from a commercial version.

This example of bringing in a commercial tool instead of developing it on its own is part of a broader effort going on across the intelligence agency. To change the culture to make information sharing a standard business practice, intelligence agencies are adopting commercial tools and reworking policies to speed up how fast the behavior changes.

"If it's good, people will use it on their own and you don't have to force them to use it," says Michael Kennedy, ODNI's director of the enterprise solutions during a panel discussion March 9 sponsored by AFFIRM at the FOSE tradeshow in Washington. "I think we are doing that."

And ODNI is changing its policies to address this new environment.

Former DNI Mike McConnell signed out a new information sharing policy Jan. 21 before he left office. This policy is part of a long-term effort to improve how the intelligence community shares data.

Dale Meyerrose, the former ODNI chief information officer and information sharing executive, says the policy makes allowances for behavior changes, but it doesn't change behavior.

"The intelligence community has to grow into the policy," says Meyerrose, now vice president and general manager for cyber and information assurance for Harris Corp. "It tries to make information more transparent by detailing how users make information available and how people can access and use it."

Meyerrose says the youth movement inside the intelligence agencies combined with the push from former director McConnell is really changing the behavior.

"As the intelligence community CIO, anytime I wanted to talk about Web 2.0 or a new level of technology, I literally had a few thousand folks eagerly try to pull it along," he says. "Early adopters by-and-large outnumber us folks who you may label as technology immigrants or aliens. The intelligence community is youthful and that has been helpful to better serve technology."

He adds about 60 percent of the intelligence employees have been in their jobs less than 10 years, and many are under 40-years-old.

The new policy sets up expectations for behavior. For instance, it says each specific area must name collection stewards and analysts production stewards. These are senior people who will over see specific types of collections or analyses. The policy says these people will be responsible for making information accessible to the correct people based on a set of roles and responsibilities.

"Information sharing is about creating the right outcomes," Meyerrose says. "It's about making intelligence better. It's about making people more effective at doing their jobs. Its about economy and efficiency as in once we capture or learn information we don't have to pay to capture or relearn it again."

The policy says "stewards shall make disseminated analytic products discoverable by, and to the extent possible, available to authorized personnel by automated means as soon as possible, but no later than June 1."

By Oct. 1, the deputy director of national intelligence for policy, plans and requirements will see how well the intelligence community has complied with this policy.

Meyerrose says there is plenty of time to come into compliance because the community isn't starting from scratch.

He points to the data standards, the information sharing strategy and several other steps the previous administration took, and many of those steps are showing a lot of promise. John Hale, ODNI's chief of service delivery, says there are 92 million documents that users search more than 2 million times a month on the content discovery tool on the enterprise services tools for the intelligence community.

Hale says more than 4,000 users send more than 2 million e-mail messages a week, and about 19,000 users send more than 5 million instant messages a day.

Voultepsis says there now are more than 813,000 pages on Intellipedia and more than 411,000 documents and images on Intellink.

"We don't know where the next great tool will come from or what will it be," Kennedy says. "Some take off and some do not. The tools we all use at home could be the tools of the future. They must be protected, but usable."

Kennedy says all of these tools let analysts get an idea of what is going on within minutes in a way that would have take hours or days before.

Hale says his office is working on four areas to improve its services to users:

• Enterprise search;

• Deploying Intelligence Community Connect tool using Adobe connect;

• Deploying Microsoft SharePoint as an enterprise services;

• Implementing back up and disaster recovery.

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On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - A-Space for us...

FederalNewsRadio - Employees to be measured on information sharing

FederalNewsRadio - Cybersecurity near top of DNI concerns

ODNI - Information Sharing policy (pdf)

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