The federal government’s online Library of National Intelligence is one of the most important — and unheralded — parts of its effort to encourage information sharing and collaboration, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s deputy director said last week.
In a June 23 interview with Federal Times, David Shedd said the library doesn’t just help an analyst find pieces of information compiled by other intelligence agencies on, for example, Kim Jong Il’s health. It’s helping that analyst network build so-called “communities of interest” made up of analysts from other agencies who are all studying the same subject.
“It’s a major change,” Shedd said. “First, culturally, it sends a very clear signal that [there is a] responsibility to provide those who have a mission need … access to discovering that there’s information on that. It establishes communities of interest that transcend the bounds of any one agency … and you have almost a social networking begin to occur on the basis of common, known information.”
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For decades, intelligence agencies have had a deep cultural bias against sharing information with one another. But after the government’s inability to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or properly assess Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and other high-profile failures, intelligence agencies have acknowledged that they must do better at collaborating.
To achieve that, agencies have begun requiring officials to spend time working at other agencies before they can be considered for top jobs. They train their analysts to share data with one another. And they have created new information-sharing networks, such as the library and a Wikipedia-type program called Intellipedia.
Read the Complete Article/Interview
See Also: Library of National Intelligence (LNI): Making Discovery Easier (1 pages; PDF)
See Also: Wikipedia Article: A-Space
See Also: Wikipedia Article: Intellipedia
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