Jerry King writes “[in New York Times Magazine] From an Enterprise 2.0 perspective, terrific article on how Web 2.0 tools are remaking the business of national security environment.”
He’s right! this is a longish article that you should absolutely check out. It’s about how internal U.S. government agencies CIA, FBI and now Homeland are coping with information overload, dysfunctional IT/intranets and bureaucratic barriers by turning to… blogs and wiki’s etc to solve the problem. A few choice bits..
The promise of social media to the spy agencies:
“Spies … could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. … Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.”
initial success
“He told me the usefulness of Intellipedia [Internal Wikik] proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out.”
to the adoption challenge
“…the challenges are only in part about technology. They are also about political will and institutional culture — and whether the spy agencies can be persuaded to change…
The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top, like Fingar, Meyerrose and their colleagues at the office of the director of national intelligence, are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors†— career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of an empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf.”
“Enterprise” 2.0 is absolutely about organizational change and for this reason, the greatest benefits won’t come easily. It’s a patter we’ve seen before, top management buys in to the promise implicitly, the youthful don’t just understand 2.0 – they demand it – yet in the middle lies the opportunity from for resistance from those in the organization who’s power is most vulnerable to disruption. And yet it may be the knowledge pool and tacit capital of these same experienced managers that could be most required to make the new system at all viable.
More thoughts to come on solving the adoption problem…