I am delighted to be here at the invitation of NCSC's Joe O'Kane.

My being here today is, in fact, a testimony to the effectiveness of cooperative, virtual, teams. Until last night, I had not met Joe, Tom or Chris. Yet we have had a good, working discussion which has produce this panel. With this, let me introduce myself simply by describing a few of the areas I am currently investigating.

I am currently thinking about the nature of the changes we can anticipate as we move away from the Industrial Age with its exhausted and depleted idea space. As we all know, this idea space can be characterized from one perspective as being built upon smart centers with stupid endpoints - our telephone system is a prime example. Smart switches in the middle of the networks with stone cold stupid 'telephones' at the end points. We knew, and were comfortable with, this Industrial Age story. We knew how to, and were good at, creating useful maps for describing it. Today, we find we have only part of one foot left in that world and have most of one foot in the "New Economy" - an economy so new it is still unnamed and unmapped.

Nameless terra incognito as it may be, we do know a few things about this New Economy. Principally, that it will have a larger and more vital idea space constructed from a very large set of inter-connected smart end points' PCs, then every device, and finally ubiquitous sensors. A world in which we will find one connected to all and all connected to one. We are also almost certain that this new economy will be organized with a better balance between smart centers and smart end points. For example, we can anticipate every object we work with will have its own cpu, IP address, know something of what it is, and be able to negotiate with other objects it interacts with. These new economy end points will be a far distant remove from the stone cold stupid telephones of the 1950s.

It is in this context that we will work together today to try to illuminate areas in which collaborative work could yield better than average payoffs.

Our premise is that, in the new economy, collaboration, cooperation, and coordination will be essential concepts. A related area of great personal interest is the obstacle created by the lack of a robust, global, cryptographic infrastructure, without which trust, security, and deniable identity are not possible. This, of course, puts limits on what we can expect for e-commerce - a fundamental expression of cooperation and collaboration as well as a key, no pun intended, aspect of the new economy.

Preparing for this panel we created some interesting discussions. This was a most useful collaborative process.

As the moderator, my opening question was this:

What are the meta problems which are concerning you? Is one problem a sense of paralysis due to a lack of an agreed upon set of goals and parameters? Is another problem a suspicion that the current 'idea space' is no longer yielding useful maps?

For example:

How is the environment in which the Intelligence Community works today different from that of the 1950s? Better or worse? Why?

This leads to at least these five basic questions, which may illuminate the topic at hand and which will shape our panel today:

1. Is President Clinton getting better, higher "quality with better timeliness", intelligence and military advice than either presidents Kennedy or Johnson did in their days? Why do we think this? How do we know?

2. Is the Community creating maps which no longer give good guidance - i.e. ones which describe yesterday's realities? Or perhaps these maps do not recognize tomorrow's tectonic shifts? As a lay person, I am reminded of the 'surprise' expressed when our maps did not plot the break apart of the former Soviet union.

3. Is the Community using obsolete map making tools and processes? That is, what is the state of the community's intellectual tools? Are they appropriate for the current set of challenges created by today's 'realities'?

4. What are the metrics for success? Clearly they are more than a simplistic, one dimensional concept such as profitability. But what are they? Are they the right metrics?

5. If the Community is one of map makers, does it have a vision of where the country wants to be in 2020? If we do not know where we are going, how do we make maps which are about getting there? What are our goals? Why?

With respect to question #1, is the Intelligence Community is using the same organizational plan and technological infrastructure as it did in the days of Kennedy & Johnson? Is this what the mantra "Back to Basics" means?

With respect to the concept of maps, those of you who have been to my web site will know that I consider maps to be stories which help us deal with our trips through unknown territory. Could it be that one switch we face is this: We used to have the comfortable notion that maps were a constant which only got better and clearer over time. Today, we see that all of our maps change before our eyes. How do we navigate if all we have are dynamically changing maps? What is the story the community tells which describes this? What, in essence, is the community's map of maps? How does the Community deal with dynamic fitness landscapes?

One answer that came back from our group was: We probably don't have _any_ "map making tools and processes" at all, much less obsolete ones. Okay, maybe we have rudimentary ones...but this is an area where we are very weak. We mostly leave it up to people's _minds_, unaided in any direct way by technology.

From our discussions, another of the questions which emerged was: Does the Community have, and need to move away from, an outcome oriented culture, as has been suggested, to one of relationships? Or is the requirement to move away from a mechanistic cause and effect model to a more organic model which integrates evolution and 'ecological' concepts?

If the above speculations are close to the mark, would a "Back to Basics" strategy be appropriate?

This introduces another theme in our discussions: the issue of staff "techno literacy"

My question to the panel, and to you, the audience, is this: Is techno literacy really the problem? What chance is there that techno literacy, in a context which produces bad maps, would have any value?

Is, in fact, the emphasis on user interface a blocking strategy used to avoid confronting the deeper underlying problem - a staff which could not use the tools even if they were as good as demanded? The goal of an 'Agile Organization' requires agile people who are change enabled. The problem of technology adoption is well known to be almost always a problem of human sociology. Rarely is it purely a technology issue. Thus the question has to be: From a sociological perspective, how change enabled is the Community?

Recently, in a visit to the Community, Walt Disney's Brian Feren noted, with some force, that the idea of "intuitive" tools is ridiculous; any high-performance task, and the tools it takes to perform it, are necessarily going to involve substantial intellectual effort and learning on the part of the user.

If the Intelligence Community is avoiding cross cutting tools, does this imply that it is still 'smoke stacking' [in your parlance, 'stove piping'] - as stand alone centers of expertise which do not interact well, if at all? Are the maps from this organization accurate given the smoke stack they came from, but not globally useful? Given the mountains of data we have to day, how well does the community do pattern recognition? Or is it still looking for formulas, the only possibility in a data starved regime - typical of the 50s.

An answer to this question which came back was: "My particular Agency is an information age enterprise. It has been one for almost 50 years. We work in information like a potter works in clay... it's our medium, our product, our identity. Yet we only know how to think and act like an industrial age enterprise... to treat the information like parts on an assembly line." Why does this sound like smoke stacking in a too small idea space?

An important consequence of our discussions was an 11 point answer to the question: "How is the environment in which the Intelligence Community works today different from the 1950s? Better or worse? Why?"

1. Ubiquitous, rapid, and unpredictable change...everywhere: in our intelligence targets (both their identity and their character), in our customers, in ourselves as organizations and individuals, and in the technology that we use.

2. The increasing failure of our old method for organizing the work: dividing the world up into pieces which are assigned to individual analysts who spend many years working on their piece, in isolation...the "lone ranger" model. I posit two reasons for failure. First, the world as it is becoming is increasingly resistant to being carved up into independent pieces. And second, the things we are thinking about demand the efforts of collaborating teams of specialists who bring diverse viewpoints, talents, etc. to the endeavor. [This sounds to me like a requirement for a larger and more vital idea space. Where will it come from? How will we enable it?]

3. Competition which allows the 'customer' to ignore the community and buy from other sources. CNN. Information as a commodity. Commercial satellite imagery. Explosion in open source. "Competitive Intelligence" enterprise (and profession...see www.scip.org in the private sector). Rise of private intelligence agencies...outsourcing of intelligence.

4. Important changes in collection environment. Loss of a monolithic monopoly status in some (see above), demise of others due to new technologies.

5. One big, clear enemy ==> many lesser, murkier ones.

6. Expertise mostly inside IC ==> expertise mostly outside.

7. Small quantities of information to be evaluated ==> a flood of info.

8. Months to respond ==> hours (or even minutes) to respond. This changes the metric from "the 'right answer' eventually" to "the best answer now, continuously updated."

9. Openness and a new emphasis on human rights. Increases the public's intolerance for "collateral damage" arising from intelligence activities. Eventually, everything must become public. No secrets forever.

10. Technology. You can keep everything forever (storage), send it anywhere on the planet on demand (bandwidth), and process it in any conceivable way (CPU). With respect to collection: if you can identify a signature, you can collect it. Potential for ubiquitous collection...the instrumented earth...the end of the need to "task" collectors. Explosion in open sources.

11. Work force issues. A different social contract...and the "end of lifers." It's just a job. Doubtful ability to compete for some specialties, especially computer scientists & programmers.

Perhaps this is why a member of our discussion group observed: We take forever to make the "right" decision. In a world of hyper-change, that decision doesn't exist. If it ever did.

To conclude my opening remarks, I would like to quote from one of my relatively old presentation slides:

"Relationships and Community:

We will learn that it is the quality of the relationships we build over time with our customer partners, formerly called consumers, that determines the value difference we create - the brand equity we build. This collaboratively created value is the only sustainable advantage when everything else is an interchangeable commodity."

Our discussants had this to say: This rubs up against some real cultural barriers in our Community having to do with the need to distance ourselves from the partisan fray of policy making...in the name of objectivity. I am convinced that this is the right vision, however, and not just as a way to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The understanding and wisdom that we need in the national security arena...the co-creation of which is our value-added, I believe...can only be co-created!

Now I would like to turn to our panel for their presentations. After hearing form the panel, we will open the discussion up to the floor. We will begin with, in alphabetical order, Tom Armour of the CIA and conclude with Chris Demme from OSIS.

Note: this version of my presentation has been lightly edited. It may be of interest to hint at a few of the concerns that came up in the other presentations and audience questions.

Is the Intelligence Community really a community?

An intentional culture must be created which co-evolves the three principal systems:

People

Business

Technology

What happens after knowledge management? How do we know what we know?

What does it mean to think together?

How do we deal with the ambiguities and contradictions created by the failures of rationality, the perverseness of nature which gives us only incomplete and untimely information?

How do we achieve the power of the whole view, not simply detailed fragments?