On Centers, what passes for collaboration, and the future

Shocker, the nation’s top counter terrorism outfit isn’t all its cracked up to be. It doesn’t have the best people, it doesn’t have the best technology, and it doesn’t operate as well as it could or should. This is not a revelation: its reflective of every intelligence “center,” task force, working group, etc. Some lessons for the uninitiated:

1. No organization willingly gives up its best people for any effort that requires leaving the office, much less the building. more. The breakdown of any such organization goes something like this: 10% of the best and brightest (and they had to fight to get there); 60% ‘those who could be spared;’ 20% those who mean well but are under or ill-suited for the task at hand; 10% people who are using the time with people from other organizations to look for a job.
2. Ad hoc unit operations will change with prevailing winds. That wind can come from a new boss, but usually its the force of will a sufficiently powerful deputy or advisor who champions ‘the way we used to do it’ somewhere else where a given approach worked well. Never mind that there may be significant differences between the two missions, no one is going to take the time or expend the energy necessary to figure out what might be the optimum way to operate hre and now. ‘Sounds good, and I want to put my own stamp on things, so let’s do it!’
3. No matter how important your mission or how much juice you think you have organizationall or politcally, you’re still going to get the same crap tech as everyone else. Disparate neworks, disparate databases, multiple boxes on the desk; what is this: 1999? Let’s be clear: this isn’t the technologist’s fault; the solutions exist, they’ve just not been implemented. Why? More on that in a second.

As explained previously in this space, the IC could overcome most of these problems if they leverage the tools currently available to them, bothered to educate themselves about emerging solutions, and ditched a lot of mental roadblocks. This isn’t about the dedicated who are trying their best in a crap system, its about those who perpetuate the crap system.

1. Except for rare occassions, there is almost no need to physically meet for meetings or actual work. You’re most productive in familiar surroundings and with access to the resources you are most familiar with. In my day collaboration was a dirty word and we had to do it in secret. There was no chat, wiki or blogs. It was a major victory to get the domain of a sister agency added to your network so that you could email a colleague. It was a hassle, it was complicated and the output wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been. Do your thing, share as necessary, meet only when you have to.
2. Every mission is different and the dynamics that would maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of each mission are unique. We have no idea what makes any such unit operate at max effectiveness because we don’t expend any effort to figure it out. Everyone just assumes that since the same model isn’t completely dysfunctional, it must be OK.
3. Someone with sufficeint authority and juice needs to make a business decision: unleashing the workforce to operate an maximum speed, functionality and effectiveness or hamstring the workforce for fear of a perfect security storm. Look, in the age of APT if you’re pwned you’re pwned; insert fire, horse, barn door analogy here. Pwned or not, the smart thing to do would be to try and work as fast or faster than your adversaries, who all laugh about your hierarchy, by the way. Security isn’t always the problem, but it is all too often an excuse.

9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, flaming shoe boy, flaming pants boy, millenium plot, Brooklyn plot, airline bomb plot, the various “five” conspiracies, Major Hasan, etc., etc., etc. . . . I’m not going to get al counterfactual on you, I’m just saying that of the many lessons to learned from all of these events (or near events) its that continuing to perpetuate old, ineffectual modes of working is flirting with disaster. The idea that there are no reasonable alternatives to the way things have always been done, in intelligence or defense, is just not true. If you bother to look around, you’ll see all sorts of innovative approaches to situations that “everybody knows” can only be addressed one way. Or, we can keep doing what we’ve been doing and expect a different result.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 1:57 PM and is filed under Information Security, Intelligence, National Security, Reform, Uncategorized, information sharing, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.