ADCI/AP 2000-01

Strategic Investment Plan

for Intelligence Community

Analysis

1

Scope Note

This document, for the first time, lays out a ten-year Strategic Investment Plan

for Intelligence Community Analysis (SIP). It outlines the goals and future

requirements for the 11 agencies of the National Intelligence Production Board

(NIPB) and the implementing actions—budgetary, procedural, and policy—that

are needed to build and maintain the Intelligence Community’s core analytic

capabilities. It specifies deliverables beginning in FY 2001. 

The NIPB, chaired by the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for

Analysis and Production (ADCI/AP), undertook this inaugural Strategic

Investment Plan for Intelligence Community Analysis as a follow-on to an

earlier effort to assess the analytic resources available to the US Intelligence

Community to support its wide range of missions. The plan looks at future

analytic requirements across six pillars: investing in people; technology; intelligence priorities; customer support; interacting with collectors; and external

analysis.

The information and recommendations presented here reflect the collaboration

and consensus of the members of the NIPB, who helped collect and compile

the data and facilitated the review of issues and current programs within their

respective organizations. The result is an assessment of what it will take for

the IC analytic community—in light of the anticipated national security and

budgetary environments we will face in the coming decade—to realize the

DCI’s vision for the United States Intelligence Community.

This unclassified Strategic Investment Plan was produced on the recommendation of members of the DCI’s National Security Advisory Panel.
2

NIPB MEMBERS

Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production (Chair)

Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection

Deputy Director of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency

Deputy Director for Analysis and Production, Defense Intelligence Agency

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 

Department of State

Assistant Deputy Director of Operations for Analysis and Production, National Security

Agency

Director of Imagery Analysis, National Imagery and Mapping Agency

Director of the Office of Energy Intelligence, Department of Energy

Inspector/Deputy Assistant Director, Intelligence Branch, Investigative Services Division,

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Director of Foreign Intelligence, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, 

Headquarters, Department of the Army

Executive Director, Office of Naval Intelligence

Associate Director for Intelligence, Directorate of Intelligence, Surveillance, and 

Reconnaissance, Headquarters US Air Force

Director, Marine Corps Intelligence Activity

Director, Program Office for Community Analysis

Executive Secretary
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4
5

Contents

Page

Scope Note 1

Introduction 7

Executive Summary 11

Chapter 1: The Investment Roadmap 17

Chapter 2: Investing in People 29

Chapter 3: Technology 39

Chapter 4: Intelligence Priorities 47

Chapter 5: Customer Support 53

Chapter 6: Interacting with Collectors 61

Chapter 7: External Analysis 71
6

People

• Develop common Intelligence Community

(IC) training requirements, support concept

of a "virtual university," and begin working

toward the establishment of an IC National

Intelligence Academy for joint training and

education in foreign languages, collection

management, and other specialized areas to

complement agency-specific programs.

Technology

• Fully stand up an IC collaboration center to

provide practical guidance and assistance in

deploying collaborative pilots and expanding them Community-wide.

• Continue collaborative work in interagency

Community technology forums.

• Break down barriers and begin sharing

databases of critical and common concern.

Intelligence Priorities

• Strengthen the role of the DCI production

committees in projecting scientific and technological trends.

• Expand the mandate of Community warning

organizations to include a leading role in

competitive and alternative analysis on

issues of critical concern.

• Sponsor a classified Intelligence Community

web-site, incorporating the daily production

of the NIPB agencies to promote collaboration and reduce redundancy.

Customer Support

• Initiate a digital production program for

Community-wide current products to foster

collaboration and reduce unnecessary duplication of effort.

• Deploy tools that will help customers search

for and retrieve information quickly in a

web-based environment.

Interacting with Collectors

• Implement an IC-wide analytic and collection evaluation program.

• Develop a Community-wide capability for

rapid data integration by leveraging existing

efforts to help analysts merge information

from all sources as it is collected and

processed.

External Analysis

• Increase the geographic reach and expand

by one-third the numbers of outside experts

working with the IC in the outreach program

managed by the National Intelligence

Council.

• Establish an Intelligence Community

Reserve of former employees to supplement

and enrich intelligence analysis during times

of crisis.

• Develop a Community-wide strategy for

exploiting open source material to take better advantage of the new information environment and the increasing number of commercial companies involved in open source

data collection and analysis.

Stepping Out Smartly to Meet Tomorrow’s Challenges

The National Intelligence Production Board, in this inaugural Strategic Investment Plan, has committed itself to a number of immediate steps that will put the analytic community on a fast train to

achieving its broader goals over the next ten years. In FY 2001, we will:
7

AN INVESTMENT STRATEGY FOR COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

This Strategic Investment Plan for Intelligence Community Analysis

(SIP) provides the analytic community with the unprecedented opportunity to achieve the unifying goals of the DCI’s Strategic Intent and to

translate today’s challenges into tomorrow’s resource requirements. The

historic willingness to begin planning our future together stems, in part,

from the growing perception that collaboration is the best way to achieve

common goals for:

• A skilled, expert, diverse and more mobile work force enabled by

technology and armed with the best analytic tools. The analytic

community today lacks investment in training and the new positions

to do this effectively. 

• A collection-smart work force that is trained and deployed and

has the resources to assist collectors with requirements, evaluation, and procurement. Without the necessary skills and expertise,

the analytic community cannot help drive the collection process. 

• A collaborative work force that leverages the production of each

agency to provide the best Community support to customers.

Electronic connectivity is critical to this important objective. 

• An outward-looking work force that systematically exploits the

information and expertise of sources beyond the Intelligence

Community to produce the most authoritative strategic and 

current analysis possible. This is a business imperative that can be

met if the priority is maintained.

Common Challenges Ahead

The stress on IC analytic resources today literally comes from all sides.

The demands from both customers and collectors in the policymaking,

defense, and law enforcement communities have grown significantly in

volume and complexity over the past decade. Analysis today must 

Introduction 

by the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence 

for Analysis and Production 
8

support the intelligence process end to end: identifying customer needs

and the information gaps for clandestine collection; assisting collectors in 

targeting assets and evaluating raw reports; processing and exploiting

increasing output from technical collection; engaging in procurement

decisionmaking; and producing first-rate analysis for consumers. The

analytic community recognizes that it also has a special overriding

responsibility to make sense of a fast-moving world for the benefit of

both consumers and collectors. Substance must come first. 

• We all face a dispersed, complex, and “asymmetric” threat environment in which information technology makes everything move faster;

in which strategic and tactical requirements are becoming more

blurred; and in which diverse and shifting priorities increase the

demands from consumers for expert analysis in real time and from

collectors who, more than ever, need sustained guidance on priorities

and greater assistance with exploitation.

• Our military commanders, reflecting a convergence of the national

and warfighting communities, are increasingly doubling as diplomats

who need more and better intelligence estimates, as well as stronger

tactical intelligence support to cover fast-breaking developments in

their vast areas of responsibility.

• Our diplomats need more effective intelligence support to do their

jobs in increasingly complex situations. Diplomatic reporting, 

meanwhile, is in high demand but steady decline, as the State

Department cuts back in response to diminishing resources.

• Analysts at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National

Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) require greater assistance in

prioritizing issues as they confront increasing exploitation challenges

from new collection capabilities.

All the IC’s analytic program managers today are struggling with

resource issues as they attempt to prioritize their work; to enhance skills

and tradecraft training; to deploy more analysts to policy agencies and to

the field; to improve consumer support; to exploit rapidly advancing

technologies to help analysts do their jobs and to meet growing requirements from collectors for guidance; and to develop outside partnerships

as a source of technology and substantive expertise. The measures 

outlined in this Strategic Investment Plan will improve analysis, which is

the most important of our common goals.
9

Why a Strategic Investment Plan?

The leaders of the analytic community have noted that the IC’s success in

dealing with a fast-changing threat environment will depend on the extent

to which it collaborates in harnessing technology, in managing its

resources, and in investing in its people—the resource that matters most

in analysis. This inaugural SIP launches what we intend to be an annual

exercise to build collaboration across the 11 analytic programs of the

National Intelligence Production Board (NIPB), which is chaired by the

Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production

(ADCI/AP).

NIPB members will continue, of course, to manage their own resources

on a day-to-day basis, and to serve their own customers in pursuit of 

distinct mission requirements. Yet, they are ready—even eager—to collaborate on strategic investment. For this first SIP, the NIPB members

have identified 11 priorities for analytic collaboration and investment—

including six that they deem critical. These six are: 

• Establishing an interagency training program to recapitalize analytic

expertise.

• Ensuring that databases are accessible and interoperable to enhance

collaboration and leverage expertise across the IC.

• Creating a collaborative working environment to link analysts and

connect them to collectors, customers, allies, and outside experts.

• Building an agile framework and process to help in prioritizing

substantive requirements for analysis and collection.

• Leveraging outside expertise to broaden our knowledge base and

enhance analytic capability.

• Developing an effective open source strategy to take advantage of the

wealth of unclassified information, which is often critical to analysis. 

In the coming months, the NIPB will begin implementing the SIP.

Implementation will be an iterative process over the next few years and

will require continued cooperation and collaboration among NIPB members, with the program managers of the National Foreign Intelligence

Program (NFIP), collectors, consumers, and other members of the

Intelligence Community, as well as the executive departments and

Congress. Although this effort almost certainly will require some new

funds from outside the analytic community, we recognize that we will

also need to identify offsets—activities we can stop doing—as an essential component in meeting our goals.
10

Our objective in developing the SIP is to produce on a continuing basis a

document that articulates the goals of analytic producers and also 

provides guidance to them as they develop their own agency programs.

The NIPB must be commended for reaching new heights in community

collaboration. For the first time, the analytic community has committed

to a strategic planning process and a comprehensive series of initiatives

that will improve our overall analysis and production capabilities. This

effort has deepened trust, broken new ground in strategic programming

and budgeting, and demonstrated what can be achieved by working

together toward common goals.

John C. Gannon

Assistant Director of Central Intelligence

for Analysis and Production
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Executive Summary

The New Environment for Analysis

Over the next decade, the challenges that confront Intelligence

Community (IC) analysis will continue to outpace the resources available

to meet them. The level of investment in intelligence analysis has

declined through the 1990s, and overall investment will continue to

decline in real terms over the next five years. Without significantly

increased investment, Intelligence Community analysis will fall behind

the pace of global events, the rapid flow of information, and the demand

of collectors for guidance on priorities—increasing the risk of national

security surprises or intelligence failures. 

• Investment in analysis has declined as a portion of the National

Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) since 1990, and its share of the

NFIP budget is projected to decline further by FY 2005.

• Analysis funding is also declining in real terms. 

• The effect of inflation on analysis spending is magnified by rising

personnel costs, which are increasing faster than inflation. As a

result, even though the number of analysts has declined dramatically

since 1990 and will increase only modestly through FY 2007, the cost

of paying their salaries is increasing steadily.

Critical Priorities for Investment

National Intelligence Production Board (NIPB) members have identified

11 critical priorities for analytic investment, which are grouped into six

pillars—investing in people, technology, intelligence priorities, customer

support, interacting with collectors, and external expertise. 

Investing in People

The intelligence business is fundamentally about skills and expertise, and

this means people—people in whom we will need to invest more to deal

with the array of complex challenges we face over the next generation.

No system or technology by itself will enable us to master the new threat

environment nor manage the glut of information we will face in the years
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ahead. We will need a skilled and expert work force enabled by technology and armed with the best analytic tools.

Previous studies have shown that the IC lacks depth—or coverage—in

many key areas, a problem that will grow as many experts retire during

the next few years. It pointed, in particular, to a chronic shortage of language and science and technology skills.

Among other things, the SIP proposes:

• Additional resources to develop, beginning in FY 2001, an interagency training program to realize efficiencies where possible and to

complement agency-specific programs. The interagency program will

include the establishment of common training requirements and support for the concept of a “virtual university” and will lay the groundwork for a real National Intelligence Academy for IC training and

education. 

• Increased funding for language, collection management, and other

specialized training.

• The designation of training billets, equal to ten percent of the current

analytic personnel strength.

• Periodic NIPB meetings, chaired by the ADCI/AP, to track progress

on critical management issues such as work force diversity.

Technology

Technology will continue to challenge us in every area of our business—

from operations and collection in the field, to protecting our own information systems, to analytic tools, to dissemination of analysis to 

consumers. Technology is also our best hope of dealing with the massive

amounts of information available today.

The analytic community, for the past several years, has rated the establishment of interagency electronic connectivity and the introduction of

collaborative technologies as a critical priority. Indeed, the Community

is already spending significant resources and effort to improve current

capabilities and advance toward a true collaborative and technologically

enabled workplace. But much more needs to be done. 
13

The SIP recommends:

• A community-wide strategy to achieve a virtual work environment

enabled by collaborative and analytic tools, and interoperable 

databases to improve the comprehensiveness and timeliness of our

analysis. 

• An IC collaboration center to facilitate the analytic community’s

move from pilots to enterprise and IC-wide deployment. The center

will focus on mapping, testing, and recommending improvements to

community analysis and production processes; identifying metrics

and codifying best practices; and facilitating the integration of

advanced analytic tools. It will work through, and in concert with,

existing agency-specific efforts.

• The breaking down of barriers and the sharing of databases of 

critical and common concern. The ADCI/AP and IC Chief

Information Officer (CIO) are focusing initial efforts on a few select

databases. These initial efforts will help the analytic community

identify potential obstacles to and establish guidelines for future

large-scale collaborative efforts. 

Intelligence Priorities

Today’s fast-moving threat environment continues to hamper the IC’s

ability to provide sustained guidance on priorities. Analytic programs

are stretching scarce resources against dispersed and shifting priorities

in an increasingly operational environment. NIPB members recognize

that closer collaboration among IC agencies is the key to improving

strategic analysis and warning, and to developing a dynamic national

prioritization process.

The SIP calls for:

• NIPB-level collaboration in determining intelligence priorities, 

reducing unnecessary duplication of effort, and addressing the issue

of competing requirements to ensure sustained intelligence focus on

priority targets, as well as appropriate emphasis on strategic analysis

and global coverage. 

• Increased investment in strategic analysis over the next five years

and an expanded Community Warning Staff to routinely structure
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IC games and competitive and alternative analysis on issues of high

stakes to the United States. 

• A strengthened role for the DCI production committees in projecting

scientific and technological trends that are likely to have a fundamental impact on national security interests and the intelligence environment. 

Customer Support

The Intelligence Community’s number one priority is to provide its 

customers with the best possible custom-tailored intelligence whenever

and wherever they need it. Our ability to do so depends, in large part, on

how well we understand and respond to customers’ needs and on how

much our products help them do their jobs.

The SIP proposes:

• Increased use of web-based solutions and commercial operating 

technology—such as digital production—to refine the analytic 

community’s production processes and reduce unnecessary duplication of effort. This will enable agencies to better track customer

requests, measure productivity, share information, and distribute 

intelligence products. 

• Better and more consistent methods for evaluating products and

measuring how well we are satisfying customer needs.

Interacting with Collectors

A close and continuing relationship between the analytic and collection

communities is imperative if we are to develop effective collection 

strategies against increasingly diverse and hard-to-penetrate targets.

Analysts must play a more active role in the targeting, requirements,

evaluation, and acquisition processes. Resources, however, are stretched

in the effort to meet this demand.

The SIP calls for: 

• More training in collection disciplines for analysts and a strengthened community-wide collection evaluation program. 
15

• Additional resources to support analysts’ participation in the development of collection strategies through interagency community mechanisms.

• Increased investment in collaborative tools to address the needs of

analysts, and to ensure that the analytic community can rapidly integrate data as it is collected and processed. 

• A comprehensive National Integrated Intelligence Requirements

Process to provide direction on intelligence priorities and collection

requirements and to monitor and guide the pre-acquisition efforts of

agency and IC requirements management systems. 

External Analysis

Assessments of IC analtyic capabilities have noted a growing acceptance

of the IC’s reliance on outside expertise, but considerable differences

among IC components in both the focus and the extent of their use of

outside experts. The situation is improving steadily, and the Intelligence

Community today is doing a lot with outside experts. It recognizes, 

however, that it must do more to process and exploit the open source

environment more effectively, supplement its base of knowledge, fill

important information gaps, and stimulate innovative thinking and 

alternative viewpoints. This means developing outside partnerships and

recapturing lost expertise through the use of reserves and other 

mechanisms.

The SIP recommends: 

• A comprehensive open source strategy to embrace and exploit the

emerging “information environment.” The Community needs to

develop a corporate strategy to take advantage of the numerous 

private companies now providing open source data geared to specific

customer interests. It also needs to exploit the Internet and other

open media more effectively and efficiently. 

• An Intelligence Community reserve—composed of self-selected

annuitants—that can be used to augment the analytic cadre for 

purposes of both surge and normal coverage.
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• Expanded partnerships with industry, academia, and other

government agencies; appropriate capabilities to communicate and

share information more readily with outside experts; and necessary

policy and procedural changes to facilitate these efforts. 

Where do we go from here?

This investment plan articulates the goals of the analytic community and

also provides guidance to analytic program managers as they build their

agency-specific budgets. Through this effort, the NIPB agencies have

committed to an enduring collaborative framework that will be reflected

in the FYDP in clear resource terms. A permanent interagency Strategic

Investment Committee will meet with the ADCI/AP to update the SIP

each year, to review prioritization of strategic requirements for IC 

analysis, to flag and foster individual agency initiatives that support SIP

goals, and to identify interagency projects to be championed by the

ADCI/AP. 
17

This Strategic Investment Plan for 

Intelligence Community Analysis (SIP), for 

the first time, establishes common priorities

and identifies future requirements for the 11

agencies of the National Intelligence

Production Board (NIPB). The NIPB, chaired

by the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence

for Analysis and Production (ADCI/AP), completed the inaugural SIP after a comprehensive

assessment of IC analytic capabilities.

• The previous assessment told us where we

were. It examined the various missions and

consumers they serve; assessed individual

and collective approaches to technology;

outlined analytic efforts to engage collectors

on requirements, evaluation, and procurement issues; surveyed various policies to

build needed skills and expertise; and documented our growing, though uneven, interaction with outside experts.

• The SIP tells us where we are going. The

NIPB used previous assessments to launch a

collaborative resource-planning effort that

identified six priority areas for corporate

investment, known as "pillars." The six pillars, which are addressed in chapters 2

through 7, are: (1) investing in people, (2)

technology, (3) establishing substantive priorities, (4) rationalizing customer support,

(5) interaction with collectors, and (6)

engagement with outside experts. 

• Collaboration will get us there. In working groups and off-sites over the past year,

the NIPB prioritized numerous issues 

within the pillars; shared data on both 

current levels of investment and future

needs; identified six "Band A" priorities—

top initiatives for investment over the next

ten years: training, interoperable databases,

collaborative electronic environment, analytic/collection priorities, outside expertise, and

open source strategies. Another five important initiatives are classified as "Band B"

priorities. The NIPB then established a permanent interagency Strategic Investment

Committee to begin institutionalizing this

collaborative process and building on the

analytic community’s inaugural effort. The

NIPB is committed to a process that will

identify offsets—activities we can stop

doing—as an essential part of the effort to

meet our investment goals.

This inaugural SIP is modest in the issues it

takes on but is encouraging in the ground it

breaks on collaboration. The NIPB is eager to

build on this, but recognizes that the support of

the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for

Community Management (DDCI/CM), the

Program Managers of the National Foreign

Intelligence Program (NFIP), and the Congress

is vital to long-term success.

Why a Strategic Investment Plan?

Over the next decade, the challenges that confront Intelligence Community analysts will

continue to outpace the resources available to

meet them. The demand for intelligence will

expand as the United States faces new challenges and opportunities in a fast-changing

world. And as technology increases our access

Chapter 1: The Investment Roadmap
18

to information, the amount of data that must be

collected, processed, analyzed, and conveyed to

consumers will expand proportionately. 

The level of investment in intelligence analysis

declined through the 1990s, and is expected to

decline in real terms over the next five years as

personnel costs—the largest component of

analysis spending—rise faster than inflation.

Without significantly increased investment,

Intelligence Community analysis risks falling

behind the quickening pace of global events,

the increase in available information, and the

demand of collectors for guidance on priorities—increasing the risk of national security

surprises or intelligence failures.

This Strategic Investment Plan for 

Intelligence Community Analysis provides a

collaborative process to meet this challenge

across the IC. The six pillars that are described

in the following chapters address the central

components of analysis—people, technology,

outside expertise, the critical relationships with

customers and collectors, and, finally, the role

of analysis to provide the basis for defining

overall national security priorities and the

application of those priorities for collection and

analysis capabilities. Each of these chapters,

and the remainder of this introductory chapter,

describes the highest priority initiatives for

intelligence community analysis to meet future

challenges. The end of this chapter will set

forth the process through which NIPB agencies

will work together to address the priority 

initiatives.

Establishing Investment Priorities

From the "as is" data presented in the earlier

assessment and the vision of the environment 

in which the analytic community will operate 

in the future (the "to be" capabilities, or desired

endstates), the NIPB members identified gaps

to be filled to address the challenges ahead.

They have agreed on 11 critical priorities for

analytic investment, with six top "Band A" priorities. They are:

• Analytic training, increasingly in interagency programs, to build an expert work

force, meet critical mission needs, and

strengthen analytic tradecraft. In addition to more funding, improving training

will also require additional billets to allow

analysts to be away from their desks for

training. The goal is to have a minimum of

ten percent of the current work force billets

set aside for career development. - needed

to recapitalize analytic expertise and develop skills to cover new and emerging issues.

• Accessible and/or interoperable databases

to improve the ability of analysts to

access, share, and manipulate data. NFIP

investments on databases are growing.

However, databases across the analytic

community are not fully interoperable. -

needed to enhance collaboration and leverage the expertise across the IC.

• A collaborative environment to allow

analysts to share knowledge and expertise, and link them to collectors,

customers, and outside experts. The NFIP

is investing heavily in collaboration. The

majority of this cost, however, is for hardware, rather than the tools that enable collaboration. - needed to ensure an interoperable environment, in which data are accessible across the analytic community and, as

appropriate, to our customers and partners.
• An agile framework to prioritize analysis

and collection. The development of a more

agile, national-level intelligence priorities

system is essential to provide for coherent

allocation of analytic and collection

resources to address standing priorities, as

well as surge requirements for crisis support. - needed to allocate analytic resources

to meet the highest priority requirements of

customers in a dynamic and flexible fashion, while also providing a streamlined,

comprehensive set of requirements for collectors.

• Outside expertise to broaden our knowledge base and enhance analytic capability. - needed to exploit the knowledge and

expertise of academicians, business executives, annuitants, former IC analysts, and

military reserves and to leverage our analytic foundation.

• Effective strategies to exploit the growing

and increasingly important open source

environment - needed to take advantage of

the wealth of open source information,

which is often critical to our analyses, but

which must be mined and sorted to be used

effectively by analysts.

Another five areas are also important, and the

NIPB has classified them as "Band B" priorities: 

• Skills management to track, build, and

sustain appropriate analytic skills now

and in the future. - needed to determine

manpower levels for the future, and enable

managers to allocate existing resources

appropriately, particularly in times of crisis

or surge.

• Staffing strategies to attract and retain

the most talented employees and to

enhance work force agility and diversity.

- needed to compete with job opportunities

outside the government.

• Analytic tools to help manage information, reveal connections, facilitate analytic

insights, streamline search, and automatically populate databases. NFIP investments in analytic tools—primarily for

agency-specific uses—are growing rapidly.

However, additional funds, targeted for

developing common tools, are necessary for

the analytic community to achieve its goals.

- needed to provide the most effective technical support, ensuring systems interoperability and reducing unnecessary duplication of tools development.

• Digital production to capture, store, and

recover information for customers and

other analysts. The NFIP in the next couple of years is making a sizeable investment

in digital production. This investment

introduces digital production technology to

agencies, but additional resources are needed for community-wide production. - needed to enhance collaborative production as

well as to allow tailoring of information for

specific customer requirements.

• Evaluation methodologies and tools to

assess analytic and collection performance to reveal critical gaps, satisfy

customer needs, and improve collection

and analytic posture. - needed to ensure

that the analytic community is meeting mission requirements and to help us determine

our critical needs as well as areas in which

we can afford to risk manage our production.

19
The NIPB members analyzed current cross-programmatic expenditures in the critical priorities. They have determined that addtional

resources are required in these priority areas to

realize the NIPB’s goals for implementing the

DCI’s Strategic Intent..

The NIPB members recognize that some of the

resources for strategic investment must result

from efficiencies and trade-offs gained through

a common, corporate approach in these critical

areas. Other resources to fund these capabilities will come from partnerships with other elements of the larger Intelligence Community—

the Intelligence Community Chief Information

Officer (IC CIO), for example, or training components. However, the analytic community

cannot succeed in this investment strategy if it

requires funding solely from reallocation of

available resources. Having identified these

capabilities as critical, some of the required

resources must come from other parts of the IC

or from outside of the NFIP.

Identifying Needed Actions

Once the NIPB members established the investment priorities, they identified specific 

implementing actions to achieve the capabilities described above. The Strategic Investment

Plan describes these actions and 

outlines a phased approach, identifies responsible organizations to lead specific efforts or

serve as executive agents, and presents 

milestone years.

The strategies and implementing actions of this

plan cover the Future Years Defense Program

(FYDP) and must be linked to the Intelligence

Community’s programmatic cycle. This will

require effective, corporate approaches to

building the production portions of the NFIP

programs, and a commitment by each NIPB

member to continued implementation of the

strategy. Although our goals are long-term, the

strategies and implementing actions will need

to be adjusted as we go along.

Many of the needed links already exist. The

ADCI/AP, working with the Community

Management Staff, has issued broad direction

that reflects the investment priorities of the SIP.

This guidance provides the basis for review of

the NFIP programs’ submissions to the DCI,

the identification of program review issues, and

final decisions on the budget leading up to its

submission to the President and thence to

Congress.

The NIPB has established a permanent interagency strategic investment committee, under

the chairmanship of the ADCI/AP, that will

meet periodically to review agreed-upon goals,

track individual agency initiatives in support of

them, identify interagency proposals for

ADCI/AP budgetary assistance, highlight new

issues in need of investment, and identify 

offsets or business areas for elimination. 

• The committee will review the proposed

production programs for each fiscal year

and provide recommendations to the

ADCI/AP on gaps and shortfalls, or areas

where the Community should leverage the

activities of one program to permit 

reduction of similar activities by other

members of the Community. 

• The NIPB principals have agreed to meet at

least once a year to revalidate the overarching SIP strategy, the desired capabilities for

the FYDP, and the implementing actions to

achieve these capabilities.

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21

The Resource Roadmap

While all 11 investment areas are critical and

need to be funded over the FYDP, the NIPB

believes six areas are of paramount concern—

training; accessible/interoperable databases;

collaborative environment; analytic/collection

priorities; outside expertise; and, open-source

strategy. All 11 priority areas and implementing actions are shown in the accompanying

table, delineated by critical (Band A) and

important (Band B) categories, along with the

profile of any currently-programmed NFIP dollars and manpower. The responsible organization or organizations, areas of dependency, and

the fiscal year in which the effort will begin

and end are also identified. Based upon the 

expected cost of each investment area across

the FYDP and the amounts already programmed by the NIPB members in their NFIP

program, we have calculated an estimated overguidance amount, to be obtained either through

reallocation across the NFIP, an increased

topline, or efficiencies achieved by pursuing a

corporate approach.
22

• Ensure funding for, access to, quality training/education (begin in FY02)

• Build an analytic training consortium: National Intelligence Academy (begin in FY01)

 -- Establish IC core curriculum, e.g., analytic tradecraft, orientation to collection systems, production 

management, information management, etc.

 -- Create virtual IC university using distance learning to supplement on-site training

• Prepare/post catalog of training courses across IC

• Training billets—ensure a minimum number identified, equal to ten percent of the 

 current (FY00) work force (by FY07)

• Increase funding for language training (begin in FY02)

• Identify centers of excellence and open these programs to IC, where appropriate (by FY01)

Responsible Organizations: NIPB agencies

Dependencies: IC Training Offices

Implementation year: FY01-07

IC currently does not have bench strength sufficient to allow analysts to take needed training and career 

development courses. Training efforts are stovepiped and often duplicative across the IC.

Investment in this area will provide adequate training for analysts, reduce unnecessary 

duplication, enhance analytic skills, increase analytic understanding of the IC, and add billets to 

the analytic workforce to allow more analysts to participate in training without reducing the 

operations of production organizations. 

Band A Priorities

Training – To build an expert work force, meet critical mission needs, and strengthen analytic 

tradecraft, regional and technical expertise, collection mastery, intellectual rigor, communications 

skills, and knowledge of consumers’ needs.

• Establish functional standards for interoperability in developing new databases (begin FY01)

• Develop and deploy new tools/software to facilitate access to heterogeneous and legacy data 

• Migrate and/or redesign or transition existing databases to a new data layer 

• Support Community fora related to interoperability and access to databases (begin in FY01)

• Establish a baseline inventory of databases critical for analysts to access and share by November 2000; 

identify pilots to improve sharing of data by October 2000 (by FY01)

• Establish IC-wide metadata standards, organize repository, and provide updating process and tools 

to automate metadata tagging 

• Foster the development of processing techniques that integrate data from different collection 

systems. (by FY03)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: IC CIO, DIA

Implementation year: FY01-07

Databases are not currently fully interoperable nor accessible across the IC. To ensure the ability to fully 

collaborate, IC analysts must be able to access databases across a variety of security domains. As 

we move to a true virtual environment, database accessibility will also be necessary for customers. 

Investment in this area will provide the essential structure to allow database interoperability 

across the IC.

Accessible and/or interoperable databases – Collaboration on development of interoperable 

databases to improve the ability of analysts to access, share, and manipulate data at any time, 

from any location.

Band A Priorities
23

• Establish an IC collaboration center under an executive agent, with contract and IC training organization

 staffing, to lay out a roadmap to move from pilots to enterprise and IC-wide deployment (begin FY01)

-- Focus on culture and business process issues 

-- Coordinate with IC CIO on security and technical issues

-- Identify metrics and best practices and Integrate with similar activities

• Establish an interoperability roadmap/certification program (by FY02)

• Fund and study additional collaboration pilots through FY03, with a view to migrating toward common 

 IC services that will allow interoperability (by FY03)

• Deploy interoperable collaborative environment across the NIPB (by FY03)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: IC CIO, CIA, NSA

Implementation year: FY01-07

Band A Priorities

Collaborative Environment –A virtual work environment that connects desktops across the IC, 

enabled by collaborative tools, policies, and a security framework to allow analysts to share 

knowledge and expertise and link them to collectors, consumers, allies, and outside experts. 

The IC currently has multiple collaborative tools under development. It is essential that the Community 

ensure the tools are interoperable, even if a single suite of tools is not mandated across the IC. 

Exchange of information about best practices is critical.

Investment in this area will leverage the efforts of all organizations and enhance tools 

for analysts’ use.

• Develop framework and processes to prioritize intelligence needs to drive allocation of analysis and 

 collection resources. (by FY01)

• Develop software to allow dynamic updating of priorities (by FY01)

• Work with existing agencies, and IC collection committees/mechanisms, and ADCI/C to provide:

-- IC-recognized, integrated requirements to collectors

-- Substantive guidance to collection community during surge situations

-- Future requirements to Mission Requirements Board 

• Oversee and support pre-acquisition efforts in developing CICMP and support single-INT 

 requirements systems (begin FY01)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, ADCI/C, NIPB members, IC committees 

Dependencies: IC CIO, DIA

Implementation year: FY01-07

The multiple frameworks, guidance documents and sets of analyst and customer needs do not allow the 

IC to effectively manage either its analytic or its collection resources. 

Investment in this area will provide a dynamic, flexible framework to adjust priorities that may 

require changes in the allocation of analytic and collection resources.

Band A Priorities

Priorities – National-level framework and processes to prioritize intelligence needs to support 

analysis and collection, help make efficient tradeoffs, and manage future acquisitions.
24

BandA Priorities A Priorities

• Identify level of outside expertise available/needed (begin FY01)

• Establish an IC reserve force composed of annuitants and other former employees 

-- Develop Community-wide template for agencies to incorporate in transition programs to allow departing analysts 

 to self-select for possible inclusion in the reserve

-- Develop contract mechanisms and work with Congress to create legal remedies to hiring or temporary 

 employment on limited contracts

-- Develop strategy for alerting retirees to the reserve, including an approach that would allow individuals to retain 

 appropriate security clearances

• Leverage Military Reserves in a more systematic fashion, including their use to benefit non-DoD intelligence 

 organizations (by FY02)

• Expand and/or enhance existing partnerships with outside experts through agency programs already underway 

 and through cross-Community efforts 

-- Make efforts transparent to Community, using push technology and other techniques to communicate and 

 involve other agencies 

-- Create a web-based on-line clearinghouse for seminars and projects using outside experts 

 (apply push technology) 

-- Review/change Community policies, security procedures, and legislation to make it easier to establish 

 continuing relationships with outside experts and communicate actively through e-mail and Internet

• Initiate requirements study, in cooperation with IC CIO, that will smooth communications with external partners. 

 Develop, as appropriate, an Internet-based interface to connect the outside experts/ reserves 

While the IC has recognized the need to use outside expertise to provide analysis not available within the IC, it has 

not ensured that mechanisms are in place to facilitate this, particularly to enable the IC to take advantage of the 

expertise of former employees. 

Investment in this area will ensure the legal and security mechanisms are in place, provide a clearing-house 

of individual organizations’ efforts, and allow connectivity with partners outside the IC.

Band A Priorities

Outside Expertise – Leverage outside expertise and provide a communications infrastructure 

to broaden knowledge base and recapture lost expertise.

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: Human Resources organizations

Implementation year: FY01

• Develop and open source strategy (begin FY01)

• Develop a funding approach to present to IC leaders (begin FY01)

• Consider alternatives to current IC open source organization

• Establish trusted agents as part of an open source strategy

• Deploy Internet to the analyst desktop 

Responsible organizations: NIPB members

Dependencies: IC CIO, Security Offices

Implementation Year: FY01

 

The IC investment in open source, particularly FBIS, has declined radically in recent years. 

Investment in this area will provide a cogent, corporate approach to ameliorating this problem, 

providing the most effective approach to ensure access to open source materials by our analysts.

Open Source Strategy – to tap key sources (FBIS, commercially-available products/data) and 

embrace and exploit emerging Information Environment.

Band A Priorities
25

There is widespread agreement that the skills mix of the future analytic work force will be different than 

it is today, but no methodology has been set up to determine the appropriate size and needed skills for 

the new work force. 

Investment in this area will leverage the work of the individual agencies and provide an IC-wide 

capability to measure skills and assess the future requirements for analytic end strength 

and skill mix.

Band B Priorities

Skills Management – Skills management, tracking, and planning to build expertise; ensure 

appropriate skills mix; and meet mission requirements.

• Establish analytic skills database to track/map expertise across the Community (agency maintained, 

 but interoperable, systems—based on Community-coordinated template (by FY01)

• Perform IC-wide needs assessment to determine appropriate end strength (by FY02)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: Human Resources organizations

Implementation year: FY01

• Ensure adequate funding to be able to hire short-term employees under existing authorities 

 (resources for administration and salary/incentives (by FY02)

• Develop personnel and security policies and procedures to allow some employees to obtain or retain 

 clearances so that it is easier to hire limited appointment personnel for special short-term projects 

 and/or recall former employees for crisis, surge, or other support. (by FY02)

• Review/modify recruitment and personnel policies to make it easier to hire and accommodate a mix 

 of long-term careerists, short-term/limited appointment employees, and contractors and consultants.

• Adjust policies to allow for movement between government and industry on a regular basis

• Establish expertise building rotational assignments and partnerships with academia/private sector

• Monitor progress on diversity

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members, Community Management Staff

Dependencies: Human Resources organizations

Implementation year: FY01

 

We cannot expect that newly hired analysts will remain with the government for a 30 year career; rather, 

we should expect that they will move in and out of government over the course of their career. 

Investment in this area provides the needed flexibility in hiring and security policies to facilitate 

a tiered work force.

Band B Priorities

Staffing Strategies – Innovative recruitment, hiring, and staffing strategies to build expertise 

and effectively manage a diverse work force.
26

• IC collaboration center as central clearinghouse for tool development and deployment lessons 

 learned to ensure interoperability; commonality where appropriate; and accessibility 

 across the NIPB (by FY01)

-- Identify components of a basic analytic tool box (mapping, timelines)

-- Develop seal of approval program to encourage use of standards-based development

• Identify executive agents for key technology efforts (by FY01)

• Tools to handle information volume (for individual agencies) 

• Deploy interoperable tools within programs (by FY05)

• Focus IC’s R&D strategy on supporting analytic tool requirements, providing study on how 

 commercial sector is dealing with analogous problems (by FY01)

-- Conduct study of level of effort required for analytic tools over the FYDP to be incorporated in 

FY03 program (begin by FY01)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: National Intelligence Council (NIC), IC CIO, DIA, CIA

Implementation year: FY01

 

Investment in this area will place analysts in the middle of tool development and ensure that 

whatever tools are developed are interoperable. 

Analytic Tools – An automated analytic workflow process that relies on the broad availability of 

advanced analytic tools to help manage information, reveal connections, facilitate analytic 

insights, streamline search, and automatically populate databases.

Band B Priorities

• Deploy interoperable digital production technology across NIPB (by FY03)

-- NIPB transition to a digital production best business practice (by FY05)

-- Support IC CIO in establishing Community data standards

• Establish pilot digital production efforts, with emphasis on compatibility and interoperability across the 

 Community (by FY01)

-- Use NIC as pilot to transform business processes through digital production, applying agency digital 

 production tools to Community publications. Share best practices/ lessons learned

-- Pilot digital production technology and tools to agency offices that produce daily publications, 

 facilitating IC participation in the production process

• Support Community efforts to make finished intelligence and database information more accessible

 to facilitate digital production, e.g., Community efforts to better organize information on the classified 

 web (by FY01)

Responsible Organizations: ADCI/AP, NIPB members

Dependencies: NIC, IC CIO, DIA, CIA

Implementation year: FY01

Web-based, digital production is beginning to be used across the IC, particularly in the Defense 

Intelligence community. Full deployment of this capability not only will require the hardware, but a 

change in business practice.

Investment in this area will allow IC-wide testing of DoD and other tools, as well as developing 

ways of adapting our business processes to the future production environment.

Digital Production - Efforts and electronic tracking and production systems to capture and make 

available intelligence "products" that can be recovered and reused by customers and other 

analysts (knowledge warehouses).

Band B Priorities
27

Investment in this area will allow better allocation of analytic resources to address customer 

requirements, as well as reduce unnecessary duplication of production activity. It will enable 

managers to more accurately determine how to "risk manage" scarce resources.

Evaluation – Better and more consistent methods for evaluating analytic and collection 

performance to reveal critical gaps, satisfy customer needs and improve our collection 

and analytic posture.

• Support and advance use of existing agency collection evaluation methodologies across NIPB 

(By FY 01)

• Product Annual Report on State of Health of the Intelligence Analytic Community, building on 

 recent ADCI/AP and ADCI/C efforts (in-depth evaluation, issue-based) 

• Budget for blue ribbon panels of inside/outside experts to prepare periodic "lessons learned" on 

 event-driven issues/ topics of critical concern

• Pursue electronic audit trails and other electronic "survey" measures to encourage customer 

 feedback/usage as we move forward with digital production (by FY01)

-- Work with commercial world to understand what mechanisms web-based businesses use to 

 measure customer satisfaction 

-- Study possible methodological, procedural, legal, and security issues connected with use of 

 audit trail data

• Reinvigorate Community coordination and rationalize production of daily publications across the 

 NIPB (by FY01)

• Explore commercial and government methods and mechanisms that could be adapted to evaluate 

 analytic and collection performance (by FY01)

Responsible Organizations: NIPB members

Dependencies: ADCI/C

Implementation year: FY01

Band B Priorities
28

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• Joint and Community-wide training and education programs in language, analytic tradecraft, management, and collection disciplines: 

National Intelligence Academy.

• Acquire designated training positions to allow

ten percent of analysts to be in training or

developmental assignments at any given time.

• Community database cataloging analytic skills

and capabilities across the IC is in place and

maintained.

• A systematic, empirical methodology in place

to determine current and future analytic

resource requirements.

• Staffing goals established that include "bench

strength" to ensure opportunities for training 

and development.

• Coordinated, coherent, needs-based analytic

career development system in place at each

organization.

• Analytic work force routinely participates in 

professionally enhancing rotational assignments.

• Flexible recruitment policies established.

• Expert analyst corps established across

agencies to permit promotion to executive

positions.

• Metrics imbedded in training to capture

improvement and determine return on investment.

• Established goals or defined measures of

success in place with regard to work force

diversity

. 

FY 2010

• Robust IC training program for managers and

analysts in National Intelligence Academy.

• Tiered staffing system in place for depth and

breadth.

• Management uses IC skills database to match

peoples’ skills, knowledge, and expertise to

meet priorities, identify gaps, determine hiring/recruitment requirements and training

curricula.

• Substantial rotational opportunities in place

for analysts to serve in government, industry, 

academia, and overseas.

• Clear management accountability for analytic

career development.

• Analytic training and education requirements

drive program development.

Investing in People

Goal: To build and maintain a diverse work force that is second to none in its analytic discipline,

regional and technical expertise, collection mastery, intellectual rigor, communications skills and

knowledge of consumers’ needs.
29

All NIPB agencies recognize that “analysis is

people,” and they support investment in skills

and expertise as a top priority. The

Community’s record, however, is mixed on 

preserving that investment against shifting or

unforeseen current requirements. The SIP will

enable NIPB agencies to monitor their performance on investment over time. 

The ADCI/AP will make a strong push on

developing an interagency training program in

FY2001 and acquiring designated analytic

training billets over the next five years. With

regard to the broader personnel agenda, the

ADCI/AP will coordinate with NIPB members

and the Community Management Staff (CMS)

to facilitate closer collaboration in developing

recruitment, professional development, and

assignments strategies. He will promote dialogue on “best business practices” across the

agencies and will chair periodic NIPB meetings

to track progress on critical management issues,

such as work force diversity. 

The SIP will allow the NIPB, in cooperation

with CMS, to address a long-standing but

unfulfilled objective of the Community: the

development of an interagency training 

program. This will be an interactive process,

which the SIP should help sustain. The first

step in FY2001 will be the NIPB’s production

of common requirements for training in management, analytic tradecraft, languages, and

collection disciplines. 

The NIPB’s aspirations are, however, that common training will gradually move beyond paper

requirements, first to a virtual program and

ultimately augmented with an IC National

Intelligence Academy. The goal, in addition to

increasing professional knowledge and skills,

would be to foster interaction—and bonding—

among officers across the agencies. The program also would provide a venue for retired IC

officials to teach, write, and both document and

transmit the history of the IC to future generations. 

NIPB acquisition of designated developmental

positions will increase opportunities for analysts to participate in training and educational

experiences at all stages of their careers. Our

objective is to provide organizations with a

“backfill” capability by 2005, that would allow 

ten percent of the analytic work force to be

engaged in training and education at a given

time.

Work Force Issues

Depending on the analytic organization and the

occupational discipline, there is a work force

“graying” (i.e, aging) and “greening” (i.e., an

influx of very young people) problem in the

Intelligence Community. Some agencies have

done little or no hiring over the past decade

because of downsizing, the need to invest in

research and development and technical 

systems, or an inability to acquire recruits with

the desired skills. Senior personnel are retiring

without being replaced with analysts having

comparable knowledge, and some remaining

veteran analysts possess skills that are outdated

and less important in today’s world. 

Chapter 2: Investing In People
30

Other agencies, however, have been able to hire,

but have recruited heavily at the entry level.

These newer analysts will require at least five to

eight years to reach journeyman status, and, in

the meantime, some regional and functional disciplines will suffer from a serious shortage of inhouse expertise. Moreover, some scientific and

technical (S&T) centers are experiencing an

influx of junior military personnel with strong

educational and technical credentials, but who

have little or no analytic experience. Both “gray”

and “green” analysts will require appropriate

training and education, as well as enriching professional experiences and assignments.

Perhaps an even greater problem facing the

Intelligence Community is that it lacks an

empirical basis for determining exactly how

many analysts it needs to ensure breadth of 

coverage and depth of expertise. Without the

capability to track and catalogue analytic skills

and expertise across the Community, it is 

difficult to determine overall gaps and shortfalls

in analytic manpower by occupational specialty

or competency. 

In addition to a shortage of resources, certain

management policies and organizational cultures

impede building and sustaining substantive

expertise. For example, some agencies offer

almost no opportunity for analysts to rotate out

of their “home” offices and serve in related 

substantive assignments in their own or other

organizations or with customers located here or

abroad. Analysts in other agencies believe they

must change jobs or rotate to a new job area

every two to three years to ensure they are 

competitive for promotion and/or career progression by becoming intelligence “generalists.”

However, in every agency analysts customarily

must transition to management to move up the

career ladder, since there are too few 

non-managerial opportunities to reach the

senior and executive ranks. This leaves little

upward mobility for those analysts who seek to

become true substantive experts.

Not only must the Community continue to hire

the most talented, diverse work force, but it

also has to ensure that once on board, all

employees are provided with equal opportunities for training, education, assignments, and

career progression. 

To meet these challenges, the individual NIPB

agencies have committed significant human

and fiscal resources to provide our analysts

with more training and professional development opportunities. If we are to reach our goal

of building and sustaining a world-class 

analytic work force with the required depth and

breadth of expertise, the Community must do

more by working corporately to: maintain

robust career development and training while

better defining and managing skill requirements; employ innovative recruitment and

assignment strategies; and cultivate the talents

of a diverse work force.

Career Development and Training 

In recent years the analytic community has 

initiated several new programs to enhance the

quality and availability of training.

Organizations have made a particular effort to

focus on training in tradecraft in a variety of

analytic mission areas. There has been less

work in the area of career development. 

CIA started the Sherman Kent School of

Intelligence in 2000. The curriculum of the

new school emphasizes training in analytic

tradecraft. The heart of the Kent School is a

six-month course of instruction for analysts that
31

covers intelligence history, values, and ethics,

as well as tradecraft.

Much of DIA’s expertise-building effort has

been focused on educating a largely civilian

analytic work force in the tradecraft of military

intelligence. To that end, DIA developed a military familiarization course, which provides an

intense field experience with the US Armed

Forces to enhance analysts’ understanding of

the warfighters’ requirements for intelligence

support. The National Air Intelligence Center

(NAIC) has also initiated a training course in

analytic tradecraft for new members of its work

force. The Joint Military Intelligence College

(JMIC) contributes to the continuing education

of Community personnel engaged in a variety

of intelligence disciplines. The JMIC grants

both Bachelor of Science and Master of

Science degrees in strategic intelligence.

In an effort to begin developing an Intelligence

“virtual university,” the Defense Intelligence

community has undertaken a project, in partnership with a collection of training and 

education organizations who have shared interests and similar goals. They are networked

together in a web-based environment for the

purpose of expanding access to learning,

decreasing costs, increasing collaborative information flow, and giving control to the user. It

empowers students by making the full spectrum

of training and education easily and readily

available online.

Although most production community managers have succeeded as analysts, many of them

are not as proficient in developing 

analysts. The leaders who shape the analytic

working environment over the next decade must

have superior skills for developing 

analysts, as well as outstanding technical

expertise in the preparation of high-quality

intelligence for our customers.

Although there are examples of DoD joint

training efforts, most organizations continue to

perceive training, even in entry-level analytic

tradecraft, to be unique to a specific agency

and therefore proceed with independent initiatives. Cultural biases and lack of funding are

the main impediments to more IC collaboration

on training and career development. 

Managing the Skill Mix

By the end of the decade, the Intelligence

Community aims to have a highly skilled,

world-class work force that has adequate funds

and staff to perform both traditional and 

non-traditional missions. In many cases, these

missions are operationally focused, requiring

analysts to function in a crisis environment,

more often than not on lower priority countries.

At the same time, the Community must continue to ensure that it has sufficient analysts and

expertise to cover its highest priority targets.

Much of the effort to determine knowledge and

skill requirements has to be based on empirical

methodologies for determining substantive,

needs-based analytic requirements for today

and tomorrow. 

To meet these goals, the Community must:

• Develop more systematic and empirical

methods of determining current and future

analytic resource requirements.

• Determine the appropriate balance between

resources for the in-house work force and

outside experts.
32

• Adopt less onerous but more precise

processes for gathering data on IC analytic

skills, knowledge, and expertise. 

The Community should do more in developing

empirical methods to plan for future analytic

personnel requirements, especially 

taking into consideration the role of outside

expertise. It has, however, made some strides

in building databases to track knowledge, skills

and experience. The Defense Intelligence community, for example, has initiated development

of several personnel management systems and

employee databases collaboratively. 

The ADCI for Analysis and Production is

developing an IC-wide capability for the NIPB,

building upon the work already under way in

the Community. While no single organization

is collecting all of the key data required for an

IC-wide capability to measure expertise and

monitor depth, their cumulative work provides

a sound foundation for the development of an

IC analytic skills database and tracking 

system. 

The building of skills databases is a first step in

developing needs-based analytic requirements

related to future work force size and expertise.

The Community should increase efforts to

develop corporate, empirical methodologies to

determine IC-wide staffing needs; ensure that it

has the bench strength to meet current intelligence requirements; build knowledge and

expertise; and allow for training and career

development. The need to determine the appropriate balance between on-board and 

outside analytic expertise must also be

addressed.

Recruitment, Hiring, and Staffing Strategies

The analytic community has taken several steps

to recruit and hire highly qualified employees

and provide them with a work place environment that encourages career growth in analysis.

For example, the National Imagery and

Mapping Agency (NIMA), the National Air

Intelligence Center (NAIC), and the National

Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) have

employed “signing bonuses” to recruit and hire

geospatial and imagery analysts, scientists, and

engineers in hard-to-fill disciplines.

NIMA has taken advantage of new personnel

management authorities to implement pay

banding—flexible monetary compensation 

programs. The pay bands will provide flexibility for compensating analysts as they reach

desired levels of proficiency. NIMA is the only

NIPB organization to adopt pay banding and

has initiated it on a relatively small scale.

The National Intelligence Officer for Science

and Technology (NIO/S&T) and the IC

Advanced Technology Group are leading a

Community working group to develop future

cross-agency requirements for scientific and

technical analysis. Part of this effort focuses

on the S&T work force, including analysts.

The goals are to ensure IC access to worldclass technical talent, sustain an evolving learning environment, foster business process

reengineering, and establish criteria for robust

investment. Part of this effort will focus on

refining personnel management practices.

While all of these initiatives add value, the 

analytic community must take a more coherent

and collaborative approach to personnel 

management. Recruitment and hiring must

take place at all levels—entry, mid-career, 

senior, and executive. There probably will be a

requirement for a more mixed analytic work
33

force, consisting of on-board employees who

are both long-term careerists and short-term

(two-five years) specialists, as well as consultants and contractors. Most economic forecasts

predict that there will continue to be shortages

of skilled employees in science and technology

fields. This means that Intelligence

Community recruitment and hiring practices

will have to be innovative and aggressive and

that management practices will have to be

adjusted so that the Community can meets its

expertise requirements.

In addition to changing recruitment, hiring, and

management practices, the analytic community

will have to adopt more coherent placement

strategies for its on-board work force. We must

pay closer attention to rotational assignments,

which should contribute both to developing

analysts as intelligence officers and to building

substantive expertise and knowledge. To facilitate this effort, bold partnerships with academia, industry, the government laboratories, and

other federal agencies with national security

portfolios need to be established. Analysts

need more opportunities to serve in beneficial

rotational assignments that build and sustain

expertise and provide professional experiences

from an alternative perspective. 

Initiatives that aim to provide analysts the same

opportunities as managers to reach the top

ranks encourage analysts to remain on accounts

longer, thereby strengthening in-depth knowledge and expertise. Recommendations for

increased career progression to senior ranks,

however, have to be weighed against other

investment issues. One, in particular, is the rising share of personnel costs as part of the overall intelligence budget. This factor weighs

heavily in production organizations’ calculations, because analysis is a people-focused 

mission.

Cultivating the Talents of a Diverse Work

Force 

Over the next decade, demographic trends in

the United States suggest women and minorities will constitute a growing majority of new

entrants into the American labor market. The

DCI has stated that diversity is a powerful tool

that can help us meet the intelligence challenges of the coming century. To extract maximum benefit from diversity, the Community

must not only increase the diversity of the work

force, but also use the many talents of the men

and women who are already with us to optimum advantage.

The IC must take bold and serious initiatives to

achieve the DCI’s stated goals in this area. We

must: 

• Treat this “people issue” as a high priority,

giving it the same level of commitment that

we place on difficult intelligence problems. 

• Ensure that every analytic organization

maintains demographic data. 

• Set goals and define measures of success.

• Establish leadership and managerial

accountability for ensuring that all 

segments of the work force succeed.

• Conduct regular evaluations of the progress

of all analysts to try to anticipate, as well as

address, disturbing trends affecting demographic subgroups.
34

• Evaluate remedial strategies to determine

effectiveness.

We must ensure that every person hired has the

opportunity to compete for the highest positions. This includes making sure that all

employees have equal access to training, education, and assignments—especially high-visibility positions that lead to senior appointments.

It is not enough just to employ a diverse work

force. We must ensure that those with different

perspectives have a seat at the table and a

meaningful voice in the discussion.

Investment Strategy to Build Analytic

Expertise

Building and sustaining analytic expertise will

be enhanced by Community-wide adoption of

relevant and coherent business practices, coupled with innovative personnel management.

The strategies and implementing actions 

discussed here are a combination of building on

the best business practices of current NIPB 

programs, and new initiatives to develop and

sustain analytic expertise. Needed are empirical methodologies to determine required substantive capabilities and skills; funding and

staffing adequate to meet mission and expertise

requirements; enhanced opportunities for work

force training and career development; and

optimal expectation of the benefits of work

force diversity. 

To achieve these capabilities, the analytic 

community will:

1. Establish a robust IC training and career

development program, identifying common

training requirements, supporting the

“virtual university” concept and developing

options for a National Intelligence Academy

for IC training and education.

The NIPB will develop requirements for an

interagency analytic training program with

required curriculum and designated training

positions. This will provide for increased joint

training opportunities and a back-fill capability

that allows all IC analysts to engage in needed

developmental experiences. Coherent career

development systems that link training, education, and assignments will support analysts at

all stages of their careers. 

Implementing Action:

• Develop common training requirements for

management, analytic tradecraft, and collection disciplines familiarization by FY 2001.

• Acquire designated training positions in

future years to allow ten percent of the analytic work force to fulfill training and education requirements. 

• Replace the conglomerate of training courses and career development programs with a

coherent career system.

Most analytic organizations understandably

stress mission-related activities over career

development and training. To ensure the latter

areas receive the attention they deserve at a

Community level, the NIPB should direct

establishment of an IC forum under its auspices

to work training and career development issues.

In addition to NIPB members, others, such as

human resources and training specialists,

should be invited to participate.
35

Implementing Actions:

• Establish an NIPB sub-committee for career

development and training and to begin

exploring options for a National Intelligence

Academy.

• Support the development of a web-based

“virtual university.”

• Evaluate/implement the findings of the

ADCI/AP analytic training needs assessment.

• Ensure funding for, access to, quality training/education, and assignments to build

expertise.

2. Adopt innovative recruitment, hiring,

staffing, and retention strategies to build

expertise.

Building an analytic work force for the 21st

century requires adopting a new business paradigm or model for recruitment, hiring, and

staffing. This not only includes establishing

market-driven pay categories for hard-to-fill

occupations, but also adopting more flexible

personnel management policies and regulations.

Currently, most Intelligence analysts are

recruited and hired at entry level. However,

some issue areas can only be addressed by analysts with specialized skills and expertise.

When home-grown expertise is insufficient, the

IC must be prepared to pay market rates to hire

outside analysts at what are normally regarded

as senior positions. Although there would not

be many such hires and they would not necessarily remain to complete a career in intelligence, they might be the only way to acquire

the in-depth knowledge and high degree of

expertise that is required to tackle some of the

more difficult problems. Ideally, such high

entry-level positions would be time-limited

appointments, to be extended and renewed as

required.

Implementing Actions:

• Establish market-driven pay categories to

recruit/compensate analysts in highly 

competitive skill areas.

• Increase senior- and executive-level hiring.

• Expand use of time-limited appointments. 

• Expand tiered work force: a mix of longterm careerists, short-term employees (two

to five years), and annuitants/contractors/

consultants.

Rotational assignments, if designed and 

tailored to allow analysts to continue working

in a useful knowledge area, can be one of the

most important and rewarding components of

career development. To build and sustain

expertise, rotational assignments must meet the

criterion of either enhancing an analyst’s

knowledge of a core specialty or providing

broadening insights into a complementary 

discipline. Expansion of the Community’s rotational partnerships with the private sectors, academia and other government agencies is especially important for the S&T analytic work

force.

Implementing Action:

• Establish expertise-building or -broadening

rotational assignments (overseas programs,

partnerships with academia/private sector).
36

Career progression as an analyst in the

Intelligence Community must include the 

ability to reach senior ranks without having to

transition to management, if a strong cadre of

analysts with sustained expertise is to be 

developed. Over the next decade, NIPB 

organizations should increase the number of

senior positions open to analysts.

Implementing Action:

• Conduct annual reviews of all senior/executive positions to develop appropriate 

balance.

Career patterns of many types of employees

entering the US work force over the next

decade will be characterized by greater mobility than those of their predecessors, and this

trend is likely to affect the Intelligence

Community as well. We must be prepared for,

and, in many cases, embrace a segment of the

work force that will transition back and forth

between the private sector and government.

These employees will take responsibility for

their own job satisfaction and may be attracted

to the IC by the opportunity to obtain skills and

knowledge that they may not be able to acquire

if their career spanned only government, 

industry, or academia.

Implementing Action:

• Develop flexible personnel security policies

to accomplish missions and protect secrets

amidst less fixed work force patterns.

3. Adopt empirical methodologies to determine requirements for analytic work force

size and skill mix.

Much of the effort to determine knowledge

requirements and identify areas for investment

has to be based on accurate personnel and skills

data. In addition, we must be able to discern

which of the analytic community’s core 

missions require continuous in-depth expertise

and should be performed by an in-house work

force, which can be fufilled by employing 

various types of external expertise, and which

need a combination of Community and outside

resources to meet analytic requirements. 

Implementing Actions:

• Perform an IC-wide needs assessment to

determine the appropriate size of the

analytic community. (Consider growth in

personnel costs; allowances for training/

surge; generalists vs. specialists; long- and

short-term employees and contractors; inhouse and external expertise balance.)

• Continue funding to develop agency and IC

skills databases.

4. Develop and effectively manage a diverse

analytic work force.

If we are to retain our capability to provide our

customers with a decisive information advantage, we must, according to the DCI, “learn to

recognize diversity as the valuable asset that it

is.” The corporate world has already determined that diversity means profits, and we can

also realize intellectual dividends if we know

how to get the most out of a diverse work force.

This means not only intensively recruiting

women, minorities, and the disabled, but also

ensuring that we have policies, practices, and

procedures in place to ensure that all employees

achieve their full potential. We 

cannot afford to waste the talent of even one

employee—much less entire groups of analysts.
37

Our training, career development, and staffing

strategies must be optimized to ensure that we

use the talents of all members of the work force

to their fullest extent. Managers and leaders

must be held accountable for the growth, development, and progression of all analysts. We

must ensure that analysts with different views

and perspectives are full players in the analytic

process at all levels.

Implementing Actions:

• ADCI/AP sponsor a review conducted by

outside experts to determine causes of 

under-representation.

• Develop specific strategies to address causes

and barriers and establish accountability for

fixing them.

• Establish goals and define measures of 

success.

• ADCI/AP conduct an annual review to 

monitor progress on: representation, training, education, compensation, assignments,

promotions, etc.
38

Technology

Goal: To make available to analysts commercially developed or customized collaborative integration

and analytic tools that will support the best quality and most timely analysis possible, with due consideration to cost and security; to provide analysts and customers seamless access to data, information, and

expertise in a total knowledge management environment.

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• Fully interoperable collaborative tools

deployed across the IC and to key outside

experts. 

• Collaboration environment shared with

collectors to facilitate tasking and feedback.

• Customers have full access to collaborative

and knowledge management environments if

they desire.

• Digital production allows dynamic updating

of a living knowledge repository.

• Object-oriented user interface for all major

data stores, fully linked to visualization tools.

• Analytic and cognitive tools for all analysts to

organize information and visualize connections. 

• Pilot capability for rapid multi-discipline

data fusion/integration and dissemination.

FY 2010

• Synchronous tools allow secure collaboration

with experts any time from anywhere. 

• Fully interoperable data stores make sharing 

information seamless within the IC.

• A dynamic knowledge base is fully accessible

from anywhere at any time by authorized

users.

• Knowledge base linkage to collectors with

information needs/gaps automatically identified.

• Single search using natural language prioritized responses, with visualization tools.

• Smart push and pull, automated summarization and database population reduces filtering task.

• Cognitive tools will assist analysts in conceptualizing, testing, and substantiating analysis.

• Robust capability for geographic, temporal,

and phenomenological near-real-time data

fusion, integrated analysis, and dissemination. 
39

Chapter 3: Technology

Beyond expertise, technology is the most

important, but also most expensive, enabler for

an analyst. Analytic organizations have invested heavily in IT to provide analysts the tools

needed to do their job. The IC has also made a

huge investment in secure communications on

which both the collection and the analytic and

production communities rely.

The Changing Face of Technology

Technological change has accelerated dramatically over the last decade. Although improvements in information technology have helped

analysts keep pace with the increasing workload at a time when resources and manpower

have declined, they have been a mixed blessing. Many of our administrative and processing functions have devolved to line analysts.

One recent study indicated that in one organization nearly 40 percent of an analyst’s workday is spent in activities that do not contribute

to finished production. Moreover, the pace of

technological change overwhelms many analysts.

Technology is widely viewed as critical for the

production of intelligence. Even if past personnel reductions are partially reversed in the

future, improved communications and collaborative tools will still be needed to keep pace

with the demands of our customers. The

Community is already spending significant

resources and effort to improve current capabilities and advance towards a true collaborative and technologically enabled workplace.

But, much more needs to be done if we are to

reach our goal of getting control of our chief

resource—knowledge—with the help of emerging knowledge management technologies. To

achieve our goal, we need to focus on three distinct, but overlapping, areas:

• Collaboration. How can we collaborate to

ensure that our systems are interoperable

and capable of sharing information in a

timely fashion with those with the required

expertise? (Underpinning our ability to collaborate is connectivity across elements of

the IC and between the IC and its customers.)

• Databases. How can we improve the corporate management of resources so that we

can adapt more swiftly to changing threat

environments by sharing information

through interoperable databases that are easy

to access and use?

• Analytic tools. How can we, as a

Community, help our analysts deal with the

problem of information overload—a problem that is likely to increase with more collection, collaboration, and access to data?

What is the most effective way to cooperate

in developing integration and analytic tools

to help our analysts better organize and

exploit information and produce the best

assessments possible?

Collaboration: Pooling Knowledge To Get

the Best Answer

From an analytic standpoint, the goal of collaboration is to assemble the right expertise in a

timely fashion to provide the best analysis to
40

the consumer—regardless of where in the 

analytic community the expertise resides. The

expectation flowing from the DCI’s Strategic

Intent is to deploy tools that will establish a

shared, electronic working environment for all

communities of interest—including outside

experts, industry, and academia—in a “virtual

workspace.”

As a Community, therefore, we need to build

toward:

• A virtual work environment enabled by collaborative tools, data integration tools, policies, and a security framework that allow

analysts to share knowledge and expertise.

• An environment that connects native desktops across the IC with appropriate security

to convey/share knowledge, while linking

analysts to collectors, consumers, and outside experts.

Each of the agencies is already aggressively

developing collaborative processes and tools to

help them work more effectively within their

organizations and with larger communities.

Most of the technology is based on commercially available platforms and software, allowing them to migrate to an IC environment that

is fully interoperable. In addition, the program

offices are talking to each other regularly, trying to derive lessons from each others’ experiences. Interoperability testing under the 

auspices of IC CIO is already underway.

Several Community organizations or initiatives,

organized at the DCI’s direction over the last

two years, are helping NIPB organizations to

address the current technology challenges

while positioning the IC for the future:

• The Intelligence Community Chief

Information Officer ( IC CIO) has provided

a central focus for the technical issues associated with collaboration and information

sharing. His Capabilities Roadmap lays

out a structured approach to prioritizing

requirements and guiding resource and policy decisions. It addresses difficult security

issues like deploying Public Key

Infrastructure (PKI) technology and leading

the organization of IC on-line directory

services. 

• IC CIO direction has helped position the IC

to address technology needs. It has already

played a major role in advancing collaboration by organizing the Community collaboration and database forums and by formulating

Intelligence Community functional requirements and developing an Intelligence

Community concept of collaborative operations for 2010. 

• ADCI/AP, at the direction of senior

Intelligence Community leaders, has promoted the use of collaborative technology by

sponsoring two studies, one baselining the

IC’s current collaborative capabilities, and a

follow-up study to examine “best practices”

and the use of metrics in current pilot efforts. 

Ongoing Activities to Link the Community Through Technology
41

The Community has made a solid start in

deploying collaborative tools, but it has a long

way to go. It is still at the pilot stage of

deployment even in the more advanced communities of interest, and most analysts have limited access to collaborative tools. Fewer than

half of the IC analysts have access to any collaborative environment other than a classified

version of the Internet. Far fewer regularly use

any collaborative environment. Moreover,

agencies are still coming to grips with nagging

cultural issues and struggling to bring about

enterprise-wide deployment. Key security

issues and lack of agreement about rules of

engagement are still major impediments to collaboration across the IC, let alone with experts

outside the IC.

Database Interoperability: Empowering

Collaboration

To provide the substantive information necessary to make collaboration work and improve

the ability of analysts to access, share, manipulate, and integrate data, the analytic and production community has focused on changing

the way it holds and stores data, information,

and knowledge. One expectation flowing from

the DCI’s Strategic Intent is to develop a data

storage system that links the Community’s primary technical collection databases to the

Community’s global communication system.

Another objective is to provide intelligence to

customers faster with new digital products that

permit data mining, customer ‘push’ and ‘pull,’

immediate customer feedback and the ability to

influence intelligence tasking requirements.

To move us along in this direction, we need to 

develop, within the context of a knowledge 

management strategy:

• Secure, reliable access to all intelligence

data at any time, from any location for all

those with a need-to-know.

• Databases that must be easy to fill, maintain,

update, and validate, while avoiding needless

duplication and providing a common knowledge base for the entire Community.

Database issues are finally getting the attention

they require. Several strategic plans, starting

with the DCI’s Strategic Intent, are focusing

attention on database issues. The Strategic

Intent envisions the Community working 

collaboratively not only through better connectivity and tools, but also through increased

data-sharing. A key element in this effort is to

achieve consistent tagging of information. The

Intelligence Community Chief Information

Officer (IC CIO) recently blessed a metadata

standard for intelligence information.2 More

work, however, has to be done to standardize

tagging of intelligence content.

This means the Community will need to fundamentally rethink the way it stores and manages

its information. 

• In the future, the IC will rely on an infosphere, and its secure and classified sub-set,

the intelsphere, which is the virtual knowledge repository of authoritative intelligence

information, relevant reference material, and

resources used to store, maintain, access,

and protect this information.

Much of the impetus for these efforts has come

from DIA and the Defense Intelligence community. They have been in the forefront of many

of these efforts, which contribute to the goal of

the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff in his Joint

Vision 2010: “attaining a decisive information
42

advantage and achieving a common operating

picture.” Defense Intelligence has been

extremely active in developing the concepts

underpinning knowledge management in order

to provide full battlespace visualization to

warfighters and military planners.

Database interoperability and knowledge management are still in their infancy and face formidable challenges. The simplified, single

interface for data and information that analysts

want is still far off in the future. Analysts still

face many impediments to access to the 

information they need. They should not have

to master numerous specialized software and

tools, for which they lack the time or the inclination. Proven search strategies or analytic

techniques should be widely shared and easy to

access through some “best practices” mechanism. Analysts also need access to reliable

expertise finders and robust directory services.

Communities of Interest (COIs) should also not

unduly restrict them in searching out needed

information and expertise in areas parallel to

their own. Visualization and data-mining tools

should not require extensive analyst input to

function effectively.

Analytic Tools: Coping with Information

Overload

The development of analytic and data integration tools will be one of the most important and

expensive areas for the analytic and production

community. Without such tools, the shrinking

analytic work force will have no hope of 

managing the flood of new intelligence information or shifting smoothly from one crisis or

issue area to another. To achieve progress, we

need to develop:

• An automated analytic workflow process

relying on advanced analytic tools, such as

visualization, search and processing, knowledge management and dynamic updating. 

• New tools that reveal connections, facilitate

analytic insights and deductions and streamline search by prioritizing information, automatically populating databases, and integrating data.

One of the foremost challenges for analysts

today is coping with the daily flood of information. Several analytic tools are currently being

deployed to facilitate collaboration and assist in

managing this ocean of information within

workgroups or communities of interest. These

tools allow junior or newer analysts to tap the

expertise of knowledgeable senior analysts and

colleagues through the sharing of data sources,

advanced search parameters and thresholds, and

knowledge maps against which searches are

run. They also allow the information to be displayed graphically, facilitating insights or drawing parallels that might otherwise escape

notice.

Analytic tools are just beginning to become

broadly accessible. Many are being deployed

within individual programs, even if they have

broader utility. In some cases, security problems are limiting their effectiveness or availability. Like collaborative tools and database

efforts, these tools must be user-friendly and

not require extensive training. They also must

avoid requiring extensive front-end analyst

input to function effectively. Finally, they need

to be highly adaptable to analyst needs.

In addition, further efforts must be undertaken

to develop databases, tools, and techniques for

rapid multi-INT data fusion/integration, analy2 Metadata tagging is critical because it will provide a consistent referencing system for intelligence information. Metadata is data

about data. It includes information such as date of distribution, classification and other security restrictions, source of information,

date of information. It can also provide information about content of the information, although considerable work needs to be done to

achieve consistency in this area.
43

sis, and exploitation. Large scale databases,

advanced algorithms and high-bandwidth 

communications are key technology enablers

for this goal.

Technology has frequently been developed with

the analyst in mind without adequate consultation and awareness of line business processes

or requirements. As a result, many tools have

languished unused. The IC has neither the

funds nor the time to develop capabilities for

which there is no need or market.

Organizations developing or customizing commercial tools need to work intimately with

users to assure the best fit of technology to

needs, while allowing for revolutionary, not just

evolutionary, change.

Investment Strategy: Recommendations and

Initiatives

In order to meet the requirements of this priority area, the IC must invest in the following

areas:

1. Collaboration. Collaboration will

require a consistent and costly effort to

deploy collaborative tools and focus on overcoming cultural and business process obstacles. We need to link analysts to collectors,

customers, and forward-deployed analysts in a

collaborative environment by 2005. 

Implementing Actions:

• Establish an IC collaboration center, under

an executive agent, with contractor and

Intelligence Community staffing, to lay out

a roadmap to move from pilots to enterprise

and IC-wide deployment. The center will

focus on integrating programs, technology,

improved processes, and human resources

across the enterprise to meet the challenges

of federated, knowledge management in a

collaborative environment; mapping, testing,

and recommending improvements to community analysis and production processes in

key business areas; identifying metrics and

codifying best practices; and, facilitating the

integration of advanced analytic tools and

methods into production processes.

• Fund and study additional collaboration

pilots through FY 2003, with a view to

migrating toward common IC standards that

will allow interoperability. 

• Pursue more extensive interoperability testing of current tools and identify a strategy

for providing IC-wide collaboration by

FY 2003.

• Advance security issues to enable collaborative analysis during FY 2001. 

• Deploy collaborative tools within NIPB 

programs to create a critical mass of experienced users. By FY 2003, tools should be

available on the desktops of all analysts in

the large national analytic agencies, and

should be available to all NIPB analysts by

FY 2005.

2. Databases. The Intelligence Community

needs to start immediately reducing cultural

and technology barriers to data sharing.

NIPB and Community organizations are

already taking several initiatives to advance

database interoperability.

Implementing Actions:

• Commit NIPB organizations to interoperable
44

database development and line up their 

participation in an IC database forum.

Establish a baseline inventory of databases

critical for analysts to access and share.

• Identify some pilot efforts to improve sharing of data. 

• Form a working group to frame an NIPBwide approach to addressing the resource

issue of coping with new data sources, both

classified and open source. 

• Identify the National Intelligence Council

(NIC) as a community testbed for digital

production processes on Community products beginning in FY 2001. Candidates

include the full range of NIC products.

• Support IC efforts to make finished intelligence and database information more accessible. 

• Endorse the Defense Intelligence community’s efforts to improve fill rates and make

military databases easier to use and access

across the IC. Look into how to integrate

similar efforts at NSA and CIA to make sure

the most comprehensive and up-to-date

information is accessible across the NIPB.

3. Analytic Tools. Deploying analytic tools

to help analysts deal with the flood of new

and existing sources of information by 2005

will require an expensive and focused effort.

To manage this process the NIPB needs a plan

that includes the following elements.

Implementing Actions:

• Identify executive agents for key technology

efforts to conserve resources and reduce

stovepipe approaches over the FYDP. This

step needs to be taken immediately to better

coordinate efforts in an area where many

informal exchange mechanisms now exist.

• Designate the new IC collaboration center as

a central clearinghouse for efforts in tool

development and deployment and for lessons learned. Include an approach to accelerate analytic tool deployment in a roadmap

that the cell will develop for IC-wide efforts

in FY 2001.

• Focus the IC’s reasearch and development

(R&D) strategy on supporting analytic tool

requirements, providing a study in late 2000

on how the commercial sector deals with

analogous problems, and suggesting some

lessons learned that would apply to the IC.

• Conduct a study in FY 2001 of the level of

effort required for analytic tools over the

next ten years, to be incorporated into the

collaboration roadmap in time for inclusion

in FY 2003 budgets.

• Develop a seal of approval program to

encourage the use of commercial 

off-the-shelf (COTS) rather than government

off-the-shelf (GOTS) whenever possible.

• Provide adequate funds through FY 2010 to

support full-scale deployment of highly

capable analytic tools, many not yet developed for the commercial sector, that will be

needed to search the huge volume of existing data stores and new sources that will be

arriving at the analysts’ workstations. 

• Support and expand technological innova-
45

tion associated with data fusion algorithms

and processes across all collection and analytic disciplines. 

• Closely track the new tools and concepts

that will emerge from the R&D sector and

work closely with this sector, helping to

steer its current efforts.
46

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• An improved priorities process to deal with

potential crises.

• Requirements guidance to collectors is specific enough to support collection tasking

systems.

• DCI launches fully resourced IC strategic

assessments component.

• The DCI priorities framework is hosted continuously on web-based software, with analysts, collectors, and consumers having

access to the system.

FY 2010

• Quarterly reviews of automated nationallevel priorities by the analytic community

occur.

• Comprehensive processes are established to

identify potential crises and conduct oversight to ensure appropriate analytic and collection responses.

• A National Strategic Estimates Center is

established, with full policymaker participation and financial support.

• The IC can meet all demands for strategic

analysis by policymakers, military planners,

and law enforcement officials. 

• IC strategic warning integrates policy and

defense communities in an Intelligence

Community program supported by full-time 

methodologists and gaming experts. 

• Full electronic collaboration on prioritization of tasking, production, and dissemination exists. 

Intelligence Priorities

Goal: To foster development of coherent strategies to establish substantive priorities that meet the

competing demands of policymakers, military planners, and law enforcement officials for current

intelligence, long-term analysis, and strategic warning, and to provide collectors with more specific

requirements guidance.
47

The analytic community has little difficulty in

establishing strategic priorities. However, it is

much harder on a continuing basis to translate

such priorities into practical production guidance for a dozen agencies with different missions and customers, who increasingly expect

tailored support. The post-Cold War emergence of a distributed threat environment, in

which priorities often shift, has further complicated the effort. The NIPB believes that closer

collaboration among IC agencies is the key to

improving strategic analysis and warning and

developing a dynamic national prioritization

process capable of confronting the new threat

environment. 

The New Threat Environment

Threats to the United States today are more

diverse and dispersed than during the Cold War,

and intelligence priorities shift frequently, complicating planning for both collection and

analysis. Consumer requirements will only

expand in this environment, as will the demand

of collectors for analytic guidance on priorities.

In addition to traditional military threats and

long-standing concerns about proliferation, 

narcotrafficking, and terrorism, the Intelligence

Community must respond to policymaker

demands for information on and analysis of

various regional conflicts, refugee crises,

peacekeeping, humanitarian emergencies, 

environmental problems, global health issues,

technological developments, key economic

trends, and myriad other complex issues. 

The post-Cold War challenge has been further

complicated by the revolution in information

technology and telecommunications, which has

fundamentally transformed the globe we cover,

the service we provide consumers, and the

work place in which we function. We are

flooded with information, only some of which

is valid, relevant and useful. Much open source

material is relevant to our needs, but the

Community is dealing with it inefficiently, via

multiple, often unconnected initiatives.

Our adversaries, unable to challenge the United

States militarily, will nevertheless increasingly

have ready access to critical information, to

enabling technology, and to sufficient finance

to target US interests in new ways. We call this

the “asymmetric threat.”

These changes in the national security environment, the revolution in information technology,

and a smaller analytic work force have intensified the competition for analytic resources to

meet both long-term priorities and near-term

requirements. Responding to day-to-day intelligence requirements driven by crises and other

topical national security issues often means that

significant numbers of analysts are diverted

from their primary duties and areas of expertise. Thus, the analytic community must choose

and limit which intelligence issues and targets

receive priority coverage. The Intelligence

Community and its consumers have established

a multi-layered priorities framework. Because

of their different masters, missions and customers, analytic organizations are unlikely to

submit to centralized control of IC production

priorities, but better coordination is both possible and desirable.

Chapter 4: Intelligence Priorities
48

Mindful of the aforementioned difficulties and

obstacles, during the next decade the NIPB

seeks in particular to:

• Improve the national-level priorities process.

• Increase capabilities to perform strategic

analysis. 

• Develop better warning methods and procedures to avert surprises and prevent intelligence failures.

The NIPB Game Plan

The NIPB recognizes that establishing substantive priorities is a resource management issue

of fundamental importance to the Intelligence

Community. The experience of the past decade

demonstrates that the analytic and collection

communities—with their limited resources—

must revise the current framework so that it

links the components charged with establishing

priorities and providing guidance. The framework also must be agile enough to allow for

individual NIPB analytic organizations to

respond to their customers’ highest priorities

and tailor their work forces, products and services to meet consumer requirements (See Box,

Intelligence Consumers).

Collaboration among NIPB organizations will

ensure that certain standing priorities will have

enough overlapping coverage to permit necessary competitive analysis and to ensure that

these places and problems receive in-depth and

multi-dimensional coverage as needed to really

understand them and to maximize the likelihood of effective US policies to deal with 

them. Community collaboration will also

encourage development of new strategies to

deal with global coverage and crisis support

requirements. Collaboration will foster the

development of rational and coherent analytic

production strategies across the NIPB that are

complementary, as well as effective in supporting resource management. Finally, collaboration on establishing substantive priorities to

drive collection will foster development of an

integrated collection requirements process for

collection management across all of the collection disciplines.

To prioritize the demands of its wide range of

consumers, the analytic community needs to do

more than revise the national-level priorities

framework—essentially a hierarchy of targets

and issues. It also needs to develop a new

matrix of priorities and requirements that

assigns specific production responsibilities to

NIPB organizations, and takes full advantage of

complementary capabilities and opportunities

for synergy. The need for such a matrix results

from the obvious hazards of attempting to rank

order or impose arbitrary priorities on the

equally-important but very different analytic

requirements of such national-level consumers

as the President, the National Security Advisor,

members of the Cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs.

A matrix approach to aligning priorities and

analytical resources could ensure that the

unique––and critical––intelligence and analytical requirements of commanders, diplomats,

and weapons designers are not degraded in the

search for common requirements and 

all-encompassing priorities.

The first step in constructing a matrix to ensure

that the priority analytic needs of the different

types of intelligence consumers can be met

with optimal efficiency is to establish a rough

typology of consumers, issues, and analytical

organizations. Using the matrix to fine-tune
49

analytical production would be an iterative

process sensitive to changing customer requirements, advances in technology, lessons learned,

and rigorous evaluation of results. 

Reinvesting in a Strategic Analysis

Capability

To some extent we have become the victims of

our own successes. As world events have

become more dynamic and the issues have

become more complex, the demand for tailored

intelligence analysis has increased. However,

by focusing on the immediate at a time when

the overall number of analysts was being

reduced, we have allowed strategic, long-term

analysis to languish. While we will still have to

provide intelligence “on demand,” we need to

invigorate that part of the analytic community

devoted to more long-term, structured analysis—the building blocks for national estimates

and strategic warning. This will require

expanding analytic depth and expertise,

enhancing training, and promoting collaboration with collectors and external experts. We

also will explore developing analysis and support processes that are less time and labor

intensive.

The Warning Conundrum

Today’s dispersed, fast-changing threat environment, in which the capabilities of US adversaries are increasingly enhanced by technological advances, challenges our warning officers

as never before. Warning is designed not only

to avert intelligence failures; it also strives to

prepare consumers to respond to unanticipated

developments—indeed, to expect such developments in the years ahead. Incorporating 

strategic warning in the process to establish and

define substantive priorities will assist the IC in

effectively managing resources to cover crises

and standing requirements.

Investment Strategy 

The Assistant Director of Central Intelligence

for Analysis and Production (ADCI/AP) sponsored a review of the national priorities framework in which members of the National

Intelligence Production Board, the National

Intelligence Collection Board, and outside

experts participated. The review concluded that

a number of changes were needed to produce a

more efficient and effective national-level

framework to meet the rising expectations of

consumers for high-quality analysis and collection guidance. In response to the panel’s recommendations, the ADCI/AP has identified

several requirements that are needed to improve

strategic analysis and warning and has incorporated them into a new priorities strategy for the

analytic community. They are: 

1. An agile, accessible, and automated

framework. Although all members agree that

the Community needs some type of prioritization scheme, they stress that it must not only be

customer-derived, but also dynamic, accessible,

and appropriate for the current digital collection, production, and resource management

environment.

2. A rational, coherent structure to support

analysis, collection, and systems acquisition.

Recognizing that the national-level priorities

framework must support the current and future

needs of the analytic and collection communities, the guidance must be both broad and 

specific—ensuring the necessary granularity to

drive the development of collection requirements management systems, as well as future

systems acquisition.
50

Intelligence consumers demand more than “just

the facts”—they also want to know why reported events have occurred, how they differ from

previous developments, and what they portend.

Decisionmakers responsible for the overall

management of international affairs and US

national security policy want answers to broad

questions about global trends, but they also

want detailed analysis of developments in specific regions, countries, and subnational units.

Military commanders want fine-grained assessments of troop strength, armament, and tactics,

but they also need detailed information on

water supplies, electric power, societal dynamics, and political dynamics in specific places.

Weapons designers and those who devise tactics need to know what equipment manufactured by other nations—friends and potential

foes—can do, along with very precise technical

information and intelligence on how different

systems interact.

Each of these consumers—and multiple subsets

of each—has different intelligence requirements

and priorities. For example, the Secretaries of

Defense, State, and Treasury have partially

overlapping but largely distinct policy responsibilities and consequent intelligence requirements. Subjects that are high priorities for one

typically rank much lower for the others. The

same is true of the military commanders, on the

one hand, and the civilian policymakers on the

other hand. Their analytic needs are different,

but they cannot easily be prioritized one

against the other.

Some policymakers say they want “big picture”

assessments that provide context and checkpoints for the formulation and evaluation of

broad policies and specific undertakings.

Others say they want intelligence and analytical support keyed to their immediate agendas.

Experience has shown, however, that even the

best-informed and most thoughtful customers

sometimes have only a vague idea of what they

will actually require and frequently change

their requests and priorities in response to

external developments. Moreover, all intelligence consumers want premonitory analysis

that will enable them to avoid surprises and

take full advantage of early warning of problems and opportunities. In other words, intelligence analysts must provide information that

consumers did not realize that they needed, in

addition to responding to their explicit and

implicit requests.

3. Balancing resources to deal with priority

targets and global coverage requirements.

The national-level priorities framework and the

NIPB production matrix will have to address

the issue of competing requirements to ensure

sustained intelligence focus on the high priority

targets, as well as appropriate emphasis on

strategic analysis and global coverage. The latter is important so that the Community retains

the capabilities to surge for crises that may

develop anywhere, on any substantive issue.

4. Integrating national priorities documents

and strategic analysis. To prepare for future

intelligence challenges, the national-level priorities framework should integrate strategic estimates and analytic products into its calculations. Combined with adding accountability to

the “warning” and “risk management” procedures, these changes will minimize the chances

of strategic surprise and intelligence failure. 

Intelligence Consumers
51

5. Improving IC capability to perform

strategic analysis. We must improve the capability of the analytic community to perform indepth research and build substantive expertise

across the NIPB.

6. Improving strategic warning. Among

other advances, we should apply greater analytic rigor and methodologically grounded

approaches to our assessments.

7. Streamlining processes to ensure accountability. Processes associated with setting

national-level priorities and developing a NIPB

production priorities matrix must be uncomplicated, manageable, and ensure accountability.

Implementing Actions:

• The ADCI/AP will inaugurate an NIPB

working group to develop guiding principles and a concept of operations for a new

DCI-managed national-level priorities

framework with a dynamic and continuous

process to circulate and update DCI 

priorities. 

• NIPB agencies and the NIC will increase

investment in strategic analysis over the

next ten years to boost the quality and

quantity of their output and to respond to

the growing demand from policymakers, 

Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs), and

resource planners.

• The Chairman of the NIC will strengthen

the role of the DCI production committees

in the strategic analysis process. This will

involve policy changes that broaden the

responsibilities of the committees in supporting a broader range of IC missions and

consumers and, beginning in 2002, it will

include modest increases in funds for technical analysis.

• By 2002, the Community’s warning staff

will expand to include professional methodologists who will routinely structure IC

games, as well as competitive and alternative analysis, on long-term and short-term

issues of high stakes to the United States.

The IC recognizes the growing need for this

capability to test analytic assumptions and

judgments for both current and estimative

production, especially when collection

shortfalls engender significant debate

among analysts.
52

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• Improvements in web-based technologies, development of communities of

interest, and advances in security lead to

better tasking, tracking, and dissemination of product.

• Common methodologies adopted for

evaluating product/customer satisfaction; ADCI/AP producing annual report

that evaluates our performance on key

analytic issues. 

• Coordination on current production

increases through use of digital production.

FY 2010

• A seamless production environment

means customer requests are easily

tracked; on-line communication with

customer is interactive; multiple security

domains and communities of interest

working smoothly.

• Community evaluation program wellestablished; common methodologies provide useful trend data. 

• Joint Program of Community Analysis

results in better distribution of labor.

Customer Support

Goal: To provide our consumers with the best, custom-tailored intelligence whenever and

wherever they need it, to develop more rational business processes that will help us better

distribute the production burden, and to enhance our ability to evaluate our performance

against standards of analytic tradecraft and the needs of our consumers.
53

The Intelligence Community’s number one 

priority is to provide its customers with the best

possible custom-tailored intelligence whenever

and wherever they need it. Our ability to do so

depends, in large part, on how well we understand and respond to their needs and on how

much our products help them do their jobs.

Therefore, our investment strategy for maximizing customer support must: 

• Enhance direct linkages between analysts

and consumers to encourage a continuous

dialogue and sustained feedback, which will

permit us to improve service and adjust priorities as necessary.

• Manage expectations so that our customers

are realistic in their taskings and better

appreciate what we can bring to the table,

and, conversely, focus our analytic efforts

on priority issues rather than stretch

resources to meet every request.

• Develop common metrics and methods of

assessing customer satisfaction to evaluate

our performance and more effectively argue

for analytic resources, when needed. 

• Eliminate needless duplication among

Community components and actively

encourage collaboration in production and

marketing of each other’s product.

Our Changing Customer

Today’s intelligence customers have more 

information at their finger tips than at any time

in history. They are better informed, more

focused in their tasking, and more exacting in

what they expect from intelligence. More often

than not, they want tailored support for their

own specific, narrowly-defined agendas.

Consumers are more critical of what we deliver, and paradoxically, more demanding as our

response times improve with technology. Also

available to them, in an abundance their predecessors could not imagine, is an array of easily

accessed alternative sources of information

from beyond the Intelligence Community. 

Changing customer needs and expectations, as

well as the transformed information environment, make it imperative that the analytic community restructure its business practices and

production processes, reexamine its relationship with customers, and look for ways to

reduce duplication and more effectively use

information that already exists within the

Community.

Managing and Measuring Customer

Demand

Today, most agencies use a combination of 

people- and technology-based methods to help

identify and respond to customer demands.

Anecdotal evidence and rudimentary statistics

indicate that most agencies are relatively 

successful in both areas. Nevertheless, the 

analytic agencies continue to wrestle with how

to better measure and manage customer

demand, and all are aggressively refining

mechanisms already in place.

The national intelligence agencies and smaller

single-customer intelligence units within the

Chapter 5: Customer Support
54

analytic community tend to be heavily peopleoriented on the front end of the requestand-response chain, while relying on technology at the back end to capture statistics on customer demand and analytic production. The

larger military intelligence producers, in contrast, are automating their request, tasking, and

response systems—at both the front and back

ends—to serve a scattered and diverse constituency.

Much of the current focus—especially in the

larger national and military organizations—is

directed toward the long-term goal of creating

an integrated electronic production environment. The large organizations, for example, are

making strides, albeit somewhat uneven, in

tracking customer requests and in recording

and capturing production flow, an effort that

will become increasingly critical if we are to

develop common “knowledge warehouses” that

are easily accessible to our customers and to

each other.

Although the relatively unsophisticated mechanisms used within our Community to manage

and measure customer support have been adequate to date, they do not meet the needs of the

Community as the workload expands. In addition, we are being asked more frequently to justify our expenditures and activities. We must

be able to demonstrate the connection between

demand and production in much the same way

as the commercial world currently does. We

must also show that we are working cooperatively to realize cost efficiencies and develop

interoperable systems. Despite different missions and customer bases, technology is driving

us down similar paths, and we can capitalize on

one another’s efforts and better justify resources

if we tackle these problems together.

Disseminating our “Product”

The manner in which we disseminate our product is undergoing a rapid transformation.

Indeed, improvements in dissemination technology have led us to expand what we mean by the

term “product.” Although we could not do so

just five years ago, most of us can now conceive of an intelligence environment in which

consumers and producers are electronically and

securely connected at different levels of classification and access, the flow of information

between and among us is continuous, the format and type of media are tailored to customer

preferences, and products are continuously

updated and added to knowledge warehouses.

In such an environment, customers would be

able to access information at any time from any

location, and “products” might be defined as

traditional analytic assessments, multimedia

presentations, or simply bits of data and information.

At present, we are in a transitional stage, trying

to adjust to these new and still evolving technologies while dealing with customers who are

demanding more timely delivery of more relevant intelligence. Our various agencies are

responding to the challenge in many creative

ways:

The good news in our various efforts is that we

are all looking toward web-based solutions and

using predominantly commercial operating

technology to build and refine our distribution

systems. This means that our separate paths

are likely to lead toward the same destination.

As a Community, however, we must work more

closely to realize cost efficiencies, take advantage of each others’ successes and failures, and

ensure that agencies ultimately can operate
55

CIA is creating a secure web publishing

and dissemination infrastructure. The effort

is designed to streamline work flow and

create a shared technical infrastructure to

make collaboration easier and to electronically disseminate raw and finished products

to the intelligence consumer. The main

objectives of the initiative include:

• Improving analysis by streamlining the 

production process and enabling the

rapid deployment of advanced tools to

exploit information more effectively.

• Implementing electronic production and

removing the bottlenecks that delay dissemination of the product to the customer.

• Managing the intelligence process to

capture and reuse knowledge and information and incorporate the customer

directly into the feedback process. 

The Department Intelligence community

envisions the transition of the production

process and information technology to an

operations/intelligence “infosphere” environment. In such an environment, the

defense intelligence community would move

from single-purpose and single-data-type

systems toward an integrated set of virtual

knowledge bases. Key objectives include:

• Dynamically integrating national intelligence analysis from multiple sources

with the timely reporting of tactical sensors, platforms, and other battlefield

information. 

• Providing customer, user, and producer

interfaces so that organizations at all

levels (national-allied/coalition-theatertactical) have access to digital data that

each can retrieve, manipulate.

• Using advanced models, architectures,

automated metrics/management tools

and authoritative production templates

within a collaborative environment to

dynamically assign, prioritize, track,

and measure the operations/intelligence

infosphere content.

DoD and CIA: Reengineering Production for the Future

Both CIA and the Defense Intelligence Community are aggressively reengineering their production processes. Both plans emphasize essentially the same goals—faster dissemination of

product and better satisfaction of customer needs—and both capitalize on best practices in

the private sector. 
56

interactively and easily in a secure information

environment. In particular, we need to synchronize our policies as we move toward creating a common knowledge space and linking

information repositories.

At the same time, it is highly unlikely that the

paper product will disappear or that the utility

of face-to-face contact will dissipate. As eyepopping as many of the new technologies are,

our key customers will still need personal

assistance in obtaining the intelligence most

important to their needs. Some technologysmart customers may design and use their own

intelligence homepages, but time constraints

will limit how frequently or often most of our

senior policymakers, defense planners, and

warfighters navigate the intelligence web.

Evaluating Performance

As we establish and refine new systems and

tools for serving our customers and delivering

our products, it will become increasingly

important to develop methods for evaluating

our performance that produce consistent results

that can be replicated and applied across the

Community. Statistics on demand and production tell only part of the story. If customers are

demanding and receiving more, we can assume

that we are, at least in part, satisfying a need.

These types of measures, however, do not tell

us how well we performed, whether our tradecraft was sound, whether we “called it right,”

and whether our products actually helped our

customers.

In addition to mission or agency reviews that

provide organizational feedback, most of our

analytic organizations have some rudimentary

mechanisms in place for evaluating their products and trying to capture information on customer satisfaction. We all face a common

dilemma—how to perform these evaluations

without a barrage of survey instruments that

are more likely than not to irritate our busy

customers and lead to survey “fatigue.” 

We are frequently asked by our congressional

oversight committees how good our intelligence

analysis is and how well we are responding to

customers’ needs. It would be useful (and will

likely become necessary) to be able to back up

our answers with better evidence than anecdotal

data and the results of subjective selfappraisals. Apart from the need to respond to

Congress, however, we should develop better

methods for measuring performance and customer satisfaction because, without them, we

cannot reliably or confidently determine what

we need to fix and how we can improve.

Reducing Redundancies

A certain amount of duplication in intelligence

research, analysis, and production is not only

useful but arguably vital to our mission.

Indeed, from time to time the analytic community has been asked to establish mechanisms to

perform competitive analysis of contentious or

politically charged issues of high import.

However, given budgetary realities, it is imperative that our analytic community look for ways

to reduce unnecessary redundancies and build

on the knowledge, capabilities, and products

already extant in the larger Intelligence

Community. Most of our organizations have

taken steps to rationalize production within

their units or “communities,” and we are making some progress across the Intelligence

Community as well.

Cooperation, however, is still spotty, and agencies often find it difficult to cede turf to other
57

organizations when their primary customers are

continuing to demand information on a particular topic. The lack of connectivity and collaborative tools (see Technology chapter) also

inhibits efforts to share the burden or solicit

help from other analytic units.

Investment Strategy

To provide our customers with the kind of

intelligence they want and need without wasting their time and patience, the analytical community needs to:

1. Develop better and more consistent methods for evaluating our products and measuring how well we are satisfying customer

needs. Without a good program for evaluating

our collection and analysis, we cannot speak

with any degree of confidence about how well

we are or are not hitting the mark. Without

such a program, we also miss an opportunity to

make studied judgments about our activities

and what we can do to improve our collection

and analytic posture. We simply cannot continue to rely on anecdotal evidence, data that cannot be replicated, and statistics that are questionable and inconsistent across the community.

(See also Interacting with Collectors chapter.)

Implementing Actions:

• Work with collection community to develop

single evaluation process that incorporates

both collection and analysis. Initiate a

Community-wide evaluation process on core

issues to be presented to the DCI as an

annual report. Conduct a first-year pilot on

two or three issues. Review pilot for lessons

learned, adjust program. Begin full-scale

evaluations by FY 2001.

• Establish blue ribbon panels—ideally a mix

of insiders and outsiders—under the

purview of the ADCI/AP to conduct evaluations of event-driven production. Panel

members would vary depending on the issue

involved. Studies would be initiated at the

behest of the ADCI/AP, in consultation with

the NIPB. In addition to assessing performance, these evaluations would include lessons learned and recommendations. 

• Explore electronic audit trails and other

electronic “survey” measures to encourage

customer feedback; more accurately determine customer usage, productivity, and

timeliness, relevance, and quality of product; and obtain other useful statistics.

Investigate possible procedural, legal, and

security issues connected with use of audit

trail data.

• Learn how web-based businesses measure

customer satisfaction and determine what

we might profitably emulate. 

2. Accelerate digital production efforts and

increase Community collaboration in tracking customer requests, measuring productivity, sharing information, and developing

tools that make it easier for customers to

navigate our knowledge warehouses.

Connectivity and collaborative tools are

absolutely essential to make progress in supporting our customers, speeding dissemination

of our products, tracking customer demand and

productivity, and reducing unnecessary duplication of effort. The Technology chapter of this

investment plan deals with these issues in

greater detail. We can, however, point to some

specific steps here to help realize the customer

support objectives highlighted above.
58

Implementing Actions:

• Migrate digital production technology and

tools to agency offices that produce daily

publications and to the National Intelligence

Council (NIC) as a first priority—ensuring,

at minimum, that systems are interoperable.

Share best practices and lessons learned in

digital production. 

• Strengthen the current electronic tracking

mechanisms employed by various agencies

to ensure that they adequately register customer needs at the front end, track responses

at the back end, and capture information in

production warehouses so that it can be

recovered and reused by customers and 

other analysts. Share best practices. Look

for solutions that are, at a minimum, compatible.

• Cooperate in development of tools to help

customers search for and retrieve information quickly. 

3. Rationalize production of current publications to reduce unnecesary duplication

while preserving opportunities for competitive analysis where appropriate and

needed. Examine production responsibilities across the Community to ensure

appropriate distribution of labor and to

share the burden more effectively. We

must find ways to cooperate on our analytic

production and reduce the redundant flow of

information reaching our customers—without damaging our ability to engage in competitive analysis where useful. In doing so,

we will not only serve our customers better, but also free up resources that are needed to address other pressing problems.

Implementing Actions: 

• Establish baseline of resources (dollars and

manpower) devoted to production of daily

publications across the Community and

develop alternative approaches to

Community collaboration—taking account

of different customer sets, cost factors,

existing and required technology/

connectivity, etc. 

• Revitalize Community coordination process

for current publications. 

• Examine methods for ensuring that competitive analysis on key issues still finds a voice

and is incorporated into daily publications. 

• Initiate a Community Program of Analysis

to rationalize areas of overlap and underlap.

Focus especially on strategic studies. 
59
60

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• National integrated intelligence requirements process that links or replaces existing

community committees and cuts across disciplines. 

• Integrated collection management tools and

systems in transition or under development

to improve visibility among collection managers, facilitate trade-offs, and provide the

connectivity needed for efficient collection

coordination among the various collection

disciplines.

• Integrated strategies for exploitation of open

source information.

• Comprehensive, community-wide evaluation 

program for analysis and collection. 

• Analytic community engaged in decisions

about requirements for future collection systems.

• Community-wide training to educate analysts about collection systems and capabilities and encourage greater analyst involvement in development of integrated strategies

among the various collection disciplines.

FY 2010

• National requirements process running

smoothly. Analysts have the tools and ability

to task and monitor status of collection

requests; improved integration and collection strategies among all collection disciplines are the norm. 

• Cross-community evaluation tools provide

Intelligence Community managers with data

necessary to weigh trade-offs and make 

hard resource decisions. 

• Collection training mandatory at several

stages of analysts’ careers and collectionrelated rotations part of normal career

progression. 

• Effective open source strategies firmly 

established.

• Broad ranging, rapid integration and reporting from multiple sources in a virtual, collaborative network.

Interacting with Collectors

Goals: To enhance communication and collaboration between the analytic and collection communities, to develop an integrated information needs/requirements process, to develop a rapid data

integration capability, to help guide and inform future collection strategies and acquisitions within

a fast-changing target environment.
61

A close and continuing relationship between

the analytic and collection communities is

imperative if we are to develop effective collection strategies against increasingly diverse and

hard-to-penetrate targets. Analysts must play a

more active role in the targeting, evaluation,

requirements, and acquisition process. In short,

we must: 

• Train our analysts in the capabilities of the

various collection systems, participate more

actively in the development of collection

strategies, provide more frequent and effective feedback to the collection community,

and help ensure that new systems are

designed to respond to likely long-term 

priorities. 

• Implement a comprehensive collection evaluation program to measure how effectively

collection meets analytic and customer

needs, better balance the demands for global

coverage, warning, and crisis support, and

make more informed trade-offs among

resources devoted to various collection 

systems.

• Establish an efficient requirements process

that better conveys customer needs,

improves customer-collection manager collaboration, facilitates development of multidiscipline collection strategies, and ensures

that future systems are designed to respond

to likely long-term priorities. 

• Provide our analysts with the resources and

tools necessary to exploit the increasing 

volume of collected materials.

The Evolving Collection Environment

The collection environment has undergone a

fundamental transformation in the last ten years

and is continuing to change in ways that pose

an unprecedented challenge to the US

Intelligence Community. Our targets are

becoming more mobile and agile, and they are

less dependent on the traditional communications infrastructure.

At the same time, the business and intelligence

worlds are moving closer together.

Commercial companies are breaking into areas

that previously were the sole purview of the

Intelligence Community, and the intelligence

communications and work environment are

moving to the internet.

The improvements in technologies—and their

increasing accessibility to friends and foe

alike—are greatly complicating the threat environment. Strategic adversaries, rogue states,

terrorist organizations, narcotics traffickers,

organized criminals, and other transnational

actors, are increasingly exploiting modern technology to operate, communicate, and move

about in ways that challenge our collection

capabilities.

Open Source: A Special Case

Harnessing open source information is a key

challenge today and will be tomorrow because

there is so much of it, and because a lot of it is

critical to our needs. Traditionally, open source

meant the Foreign Broadcast Information

Service’s (FBIS) daily catch of press and other

Chapter 6: Interacting with Collectors
62

media, which provided useful context and color

to intelligence analysis. Today, open source

material of relevance to analysts working in a

dispersed threat environment is dauntingly

voluminous, and the Intelligence Community is

not keeping up with it.

Exploiting open source information requires a

broad, multifaceted strategy: full access to the

Internet and skill in using it, state-of-the-art

software and analytic tools to mine the

Worldwide Web; partnerships with commercial

vendors to keep pace with rapid advances in

information technology; and a more mobile

cadre of analysts who are prepared to engage

comfortably—and effectively—with academics,

scientists, businessmen, and others with information or expertise relevant to our needs.

Today, the open source community, led principally by FBIS, is making some headway in

bounding the problem, but it does not have the

resources and is not empowered to meet the

challenge. Many other initiatives touch on the

open-source problem, but they are neither coordinated nor comprehensive, and they fail to

address the problem squarely. The NIPB has

made the development of an Intelligence

Community strategy for open source a top priority for investment and concerted action over

the next few years (see chapter on External

Analysis).

Analytic Support to Collection Strategies

and Targeting 

One of the biggest problems we face as an analytic community today is helping our analysts

better understand the collection management

process and the capabilities of various collection systems. Yet, the complex world that we

must analyze, and the difficult and often technical issues that we must address, demand that

our analysts become more actively involved in

tasking collection systems and developing integrated collection strategies.

Most components of the analytic community—

as well as many of the collection agencies—

have made at least a modest effort to bolster

their education programs. Training, however, is

only a first step in enabling and encouraging

analysts to provide more input into decisions

concerning intelligence collection. We must

establish mechanisms through which analysts

can help collectors develop near- and long-term

collection strategies. The Community’s record

in this area is mixed but improving.

As an analytic community, we need to take a

hard look at these activities and how they relate

(or should relate) to one another. And we need

to identify other programs or processes we

should be fostering to develop closer ties

between analysts and collectors.

Evaluating Collection: Are We Satisfying

Customer Needs?

Evaluation must be an implicit part of any good

collection strategy, and the analytic community—as a direct customer of collection and a

critical interface with the military, policy, and

law enforcement communities—must play an

active role. Evaluation needs to take place on

several levels. At the micro level, there must

be feedback mechanisms to indicate whether

specific information needs have been satisfied

and whether the intelligence provided was

timely and relevant. At the macro level, we

need to answer the larger questions: “What

does all this add up to; did we collect the intelligence necessary to answer key questions and

make sound analytic judgments; have we

enhanced our consumers’ collective knowledge
63

about an issue or problem?”

Current collection evaluation tends to occur

within, but not across, collection disciplines.

Feedback mechanisms vary in effectiveness

and generally focus on the micro level. In

addition, these efforts by definition consist of

collectors overseeing evaluations of their own

product. This is not necessarily bad, but it can

raise questions about objectivity—particularly

when collectors are competing for scarce

resources—and it only indirectly provides

Community managers with insights into overall

or relative performance. In short, disciplinespecific evaluations are of limited utility to

Community managers trying to make decisions

about tradeoffs or synergies among collection

programs. 

The identification of intelligence gaps has

sometimes been a byproduct of Intelligence

Community studies, but these studies were not

designed to provide a systematic assessment of

collection performance and customer satisfaction. In addition, the Community has from

time to time prepared “lessons learned” assessments of its performance on specific countries

or issues. These types of studies have proved

useful and have been well-received by national

and defense consumers and by Congress.

In the past several years, the Intelligence

Community also has begun to address evaluation at the macro level—across the various collection disciplines and across topics—and to

develop the kind of quantitative and trend data

that should help managers assess collection

strategies, customer satisfaction, and allocation

of resources more effectively.

Clearly, the Intelligence Community has a way

to go in developing a useful and comprehensive

evaluation program that cuts across collection

disciplines. We must strengthen well-conceived

and proven tools already in use but also develop other methodologies to address collection

performance. Such evaluations must take the

entire collection cycle into consideration so that

not only deficiencies in collection are identified but also deficiencies in processing and

exploitation of intelligence. As a key customer

of collection and as the critical interface

between the IC and its consumers, the analytic

community must be at the center of the effort.

Managing Collection Requirements and

Tasking

The way the Intelligence Community manages

collection requirements remains complex and

inefficient. National priorities documents provide only a framework of general priorities.

The Intelligence Community has no overarching process for integrating and prioritizing

information needs and turning them into collection requirements. Instead, we have multiple

sets of standing requirements that are specific

to each collection discipline, and that take only

modest account of potential contributions from

other disciplines.

All of the collection disciplines have begun to

recognize that success, both as individual

organizations and as an Intelligence

Community, will depend increasingly on more

collaborative management of collection requirements and development of coherent multidisciplinary collection strategies, and that the analytic community can be an asset and an ally in

working these issues. Partly for this 

reason, most have taken steps to improve the

accountability and visibility of their requirements processes and systems.
64

Laudable as many curent efforts to improve the

requirements and tasking process are, they go

only part way toward resolving some fundamental shortcomings. They do not, for example, reduce the complexity and diversity of

“front door” entries into the collection requirements world. They also do not provide integrated collection management tools and

processes to improve interaction among collection managers, facilitate trade-offs, and provide

the connectivity needed for efficient cross-discipline collection. 

A National Integrated Intelligence

Requirements Process

Developing a requirements process that cuts

across the collection disciplines and assessing

the level and effectiveness of overall collection

efforts remain extremely difficult. The ADCI

for Analysis and Production and the ADCI for

Collection are working together and with other

components in the Intelligence Community to

achieve a more coherent and integrated frontto-back-end collection management process.

During the past year, a number of new initiatives have emerged: 

• The two ADCIs have provided initial funding for a collection management system to

be used by all of the collection disciplines.

The system will provide an integrated collection management capability—enabling

information sharing among the various collection communities and users of intelligence data. It should improve interaction

and enable collection managers to collaborate directly with planners, analysts, collection system operators, and exploitation and

dissemination specialists to ensure that

requirements are met rapidly and efficiently.

The system will provide users with a capability to track the status of their requirements and to adjust their collection requirements to rapidly changing intelligence needs

and priorities. 

• The new board was established last year

under the chairmanship of the ADCI for

Administration and vice-chairmanship of the

ADCI/AP and ADCI/C to oversee the development of national requiements for future

systems. The board serves as the DCI’s

focal point for identifying future intelligence

needs within the national security missions

and as customer advocates for those needs

as they relate to Intelligence Community

strategic planning, programming, and acquisition decisions. The board takes the longterm view in defining and prioritizing needs,

and constructs detailed system requirements

documents related to the acquisition of intelligence capabilities. 

These efforts are steps in the right direction.

The analytic community, however, must now

help sustain such activities and work together

with the ADCI/C and the collection community

to ensure that strategic and near-term analytic

priorities inform and drive collection requirements and management. In short, the time is

now ripe for a new national integrated intelligence requirements process that will link the

activities described above and provide the critical interface between analysis and collection,

information needs and collection requirements,

and analytic priorities and long-term acquisition strategies.

Strengthening our Processing and

Exploitation Capabilities

Technology has greatly increased the amount of
65

information the Intelligence Community is able

to collect, but our ability to process and exploit

that information has not kept pace—and in

some cases has fallen behind previous levels.

Previous IC assessments have noted that the

revolution in information technology and

telecommunications has changed the imagery

and signals intelligence worlds from collectionconstrained to exploitation-constrained environments. We have not been able to take advantage of potentially valuable information

because we do not have the resources to exploit

it.

Despite the front-loading of analytic manpower

in collection organizations, our capabilities in

these areas remain inadequate. The problem is

due only in part to the personnel cuts of the last

ten years—cuts that have affected the entire

enalytic community. The problem also lies in

an aging infrastructure and lack of investment

in the technological tools and expertise needed

to exploit the emerging global net. We must

address this issue as a Community because it

will have a significant impact on our ability to

exploit fully the current and future capabilities

of our collection systems and ultimately serve

our policy, military, and other customers. 

An Investment Strategy for Enhancing

Interaction with Collectors

Analytic involvement in the collection

process—including targeting, evaluation, setting priorities, tasking systems, and processing

and exploiting collected information—will

require a significantly greater commitment in

people and resources than is currently the case.

We need to leverage these resources carefully—

participating in and strengthening initiatives

that promise the greatest payoff. As top priorities, we must: 

1. Establish a Community-wide training program to educate analysts on collection management and systems. Our analysts must

understand collectors’ needs, capabilities, and

constraints to participate more actively in the

collection process. Collection training should

be made a mandatory part of the career progression for all analysts, and those who develop

the requisite collection management skills

should be recognized and rewarded 

professionally.

Implementing Actions:

• Evaluate existing collection training activities in the Community and baseline

resources currently devoted to them.

Identify best practices and/or centers of

excellence. Establish an IC-wide curriculum

on collection programs, building—where

possible—on training already offered by

individual agencies. Start with introductory

courses and training for new recruits.

Follow with advanced training on collection

management and the development of collection strategies. Designate core courses that

should be mandatory. Tie to “virtual university” initiative in Chapter 2 (Investing in

People). 

2. Strengthen the role of analysts and promote collaboration with collectors in the

development of collection strategies—including for open source information—and the

acquisition of future collection capabilities.

Analysts and collectors must interact more

closely in determining collection shortfalls,

identifying future needs, and developing remedies to better guide collection and respond to

intelligence gaps. This area is likely to require

major resource investment, and we therefore

need to take a hard look at how best to manage
66

our resources. This involves examining existing efforts that use analysts to help in collection

targeting and new initiatives designed to

improve collection effectiveness through crossdiscipline planning and development of innovative collection methodologies.

Implementing Actions:

• Develop a comprehensive and focused opensource strategy to exploit this growing—and

increasingly important—source of information and expertise.

• Conduct a Community-wide review of

ongoing efforts to improve collaboration

between analysts and collectors. Identify

best practices and lessons learned. Review

possible new areas for analyst-collector

interaction. 

• Establish aggressive program in which analysts serve rotational tours in collection

agencies and DCI centers specifically to

work on collection targeting, strategy, and

systems acquisition issues. Look for innovative approaches—including short-term rotations of one-, two-, or three-months’ duration. The objective is to complement collection training, enhance analyst-collector interaction, and provide real input on specific

collection problems where most needed.

ADCI/AP will work with the ADCI/C and

others to identify issues/areas where analytic

resources can be used most effectively. 

• Benchmark additional analytic resources

necessary to support collection-related activity (ADCI/AP action with input from NIPB

agencies). Ensure that these activities are

tied to any new national integrated intelligence requirements process. 

3. Develop better methods for evaluating

collection and measuring satisfaction of customer needs. We must have an evaluation

system that allows us to assess how well we are

doing to satisfy our customers and fill intelligence gaps, and that helps us make informed

decisions about difficult tradeoffs between 

collection platforms and future acquisition

capabilities. This evaluative process must also

help us accurately determine whether deficiencies are due to collection activities and capabilities themselves or to shortfalls in processing

and exploitation of the information collected.

To do so, we need a set of complementary evaluation programs that provide micro-level data

on satisfaction of specific requirements as well

as macro-level data on performance across the

collection disciplines; information on the performance of individual collection systems on

both an absolute and relative basis, but also

assessments of how we are doing as a

Community to address critical needs. In other

words, we need both broad-based studies that

cut across issues and collection disciplines, and

in-depth studies of single issues and individual

collection disciplines. Finally, we need longitudinal studies that allow for trend analysis as

well as narrowly focused studies that provide

valuable "lessons learned" in collecting against

specific targets or issues.

Implementing Actions:

• Establish a steering group under the chairmanship of the ADCI/AP to provide oversight of a Community-wide and multifaceted

evaluation program. The steering group will

oversee/monitor the efforts described below.

ADCI/AP will provide an annual update to

the DCI, DDCI/CM, and the NIPB on the

overall evaluation effort. 
67

• Advance the use of existing agency collection evaluation methodologies on the relative

performance of collection systems and platforms over time. Expand to include other

organizations where appropriate. 

• Review/build upon the recent effort of the

ADCI/AP and ADCI/C in developing a joint

annual report on the state of the Intelligence

Community. This review should cut across

agencies and be based on a consistent,

repeatable methodology. It should provide

an in-depth evaluation of how well we have

performed in meeting customer needs and

filling critical intelligence gaps on a series

of key issues. It should take into account

competing requirements and identify shortfalls in the collection, processing, and

exploitation cycle. It should also provide

actionable recommendations to overcome

identified shortfalls. 

• Appoint blue ribbon panels—ideally a mix

of inside and outside experts—to prepare ad

hoc "lessons learned" studies on event-driven issues or topics of critical concern to our

customers. 

• Establish a cross-agency working group to

explore types of electronic feedback/evaluation mechanisms in use or planned as part of

collection management systems currently

under development (e.g., audit trails, site

visit measures, popup screens, and mandatory versus voluntary evaluation menus).

Cross-fertilize with activities underway in

analytic organizations as part of production

reengineering efforts. Evaluate commercial

methods and software that might provide

easy and consistent statistics across the

Community on customer usage and satisfaction and on demand-to-response ratios for

standing and ad hoc intelligence requirements. 

4. Develop a National Integrated Intelligence

Requirements Process. We must establish a

single process to integrate and prioritize

requirements across disciplines and mission

areas. Without such a process, collectors will

be left to integrate and prioritize requirements

within their separate stovepipes; the analytic

community will continue to have poor visibility

into the status of collection; the Intelligence

Community will be deprived of a means to

make efficient trade-offs across platforms and

manage future acquisitions; and non-military

national information requirements will continue

to compete for collection satisfaction on an

individual basis with the vast quantity of military requirements that are fully integrated and

prioritized.

This process must allow Community analysts to

submit, integrate, and prioritize information

needs for all collectors and provide analysts

and collectors visibility into the status of collection through the entire tasking, processing,

exploitation, and dissemination cycle. It must

include a leadership entity with responsibility

for adjudicating conflicts on intelligence priorities; assuring balanced collection; identifying

future requirements; and supporting strategic

planning.

Implementing Actions:

• Build on recent studies to map the existing

requirements process. Based on these studies, develop a framework and processes for

integrating and prioritizing intelligence

needs. 
68

• Ensure that investment in analytic tools

development addresses needs of analysts in

collection agencies, as well as those in other

parts of the analytic community. Focus on

tools that are interoperable and compatible

across the Community. (Implementing

actions are addressed more fully in the

Technology chapter.)

• Develop a Community-wide capability that

will flag events of importance as the information is collected and processed, as well as

the necessary tools to allow analysts to integrate the data quickly with information from

other multiple sources. 

• Study the costs and benefits of establishing

a Community analytic center to provide a

prototyping or demonstration capability for

data integration. Look for ways to leverage

existing efforts.

• Establish an Annual Integrated Information

Requirements Plan that will provide prioritized direction to the ADCI for Collection’s

annual plan for allocating collection. Marry

this plan to software that will allow dynamic

updating of priorities. 

• Work with existing individual Community

collection committees and/or mechanisms to

provide: Community-recognized, integrated

information priorities to the collectors; substantive guidance during surge situations;

and integrated and prioritized future information needs to the new future requirements

board.

• In conjunction with the above, monitor and

support the pre-acquisition efforts of the

integrated IC collection management system

and of the agency requirements systems.

5. Ensure adequate resources for the processing and exploitation of collected intelligence.

No matter how sophisticated or capable our

collection systems are, they remain of little

value if we are unable to process and exploit

the information collected in a timely and

focused fashion. Our capabilities in technical

processing and exploitation of information have

suffered in recent years from cuts in personnel

and lack of investment in infrastructure and

expertise-building. Fixing this problem must

be a top priority for the entire Intelligence

Community.

Implementing Actions:

• ADCI/AP work with NSA, NIMA, and others to ensure that analytic capabilities are

addressed in agency-specific strategic plans

and annual budget submissions.
69
70

Desired Outcomes:

FY 2005

• Routine interagency collaboration on

external research plans, objectives, and

events.

• New external interaction policies and

legislation focused on risk management.

• IC skills clearinghouse, policies, and

contracting vehicle to support an

Intelligence reserve.

• Convenient collaboration with external

experts at both classified and unclassified levels.

• Easy and routine use of alternative/competitive analysis in appropriate IC products.

• IC-level strategy to set priorities for data

mining and Internet exploitation.

FY 2010

• Analytic, policy, and legislative culture

that supports full exploitation and integration of external experts. 

• Intelligence reserve fully operational and

part of IC planning and support.

• Real-time collaboration from analytic

desktop at multiple levels of security as

appropriate. 

• Alternative/competitive analysis fully

integrated into IC products as appropriate.

• Increased level of effort to engage external expertise is tied to IC strategy to

exploit the expanding realm of unclassified information.

Engaging External Expertise

Goal: To enhance our analysis through collaboration with academia, industry, and nongovernmental organizations, to expand our knowledge base, share burdens, challenge

assumptions, bring additional perspectives to bear, and encourage innovative thinking.
71

The Intelligence Community no longer has, if

ever it did, the expert on every topic of potential national security interest. We must systematically look to outside experts to help us

exploit the open source environment more

effectively, fill important information gaps, and

stimulate innovative thinking and alternative

viewpoints. The range of outside expertise we

can tap to do this is impressive and more readily accessible than ever before. We must leverage this expertise and take advantage of the

new information environment to produce the

most authoritative analysis.

Leveraging External Research in a Changing

Environment

Over the past decade, the quantity of intelligence-relevant information available from open

sources and outside experts has increased dramatically. The globalization of the media

(illustrated, for instance, by CNN’s coverage of

the Gulf War in 1991), the rapid development

of the Internet and new communications technologies, and the emergence of the global economy have all combined to provide an infusion

of open and gray1 information that has never

before been so widely and readily available.

Much of this unclassified information has significant utility to the Intelligence Community

and our customers. Identifying, gaining access

to, and evaluating that information, however,

poses a significant challenge.

As the volume of relevant information has

grown, the number, diversity, and complexity of

intelligence targets has increased. Today’s

intelligence analysts face a multipolar world in

which a growing number of state and nonstate

actors pose a significant danger to the United

States. As a result, our analytic community is

asked, and must be prepared, to respond on a

broad range of topics. Moreover, the

Intelligence Community is frequently required

to shift rapidly to new topics that were barely

on the intelligence horizon yesterday but about

which policymakers need sophisticated, 

in-depth assessments today.

In this more interdependent world, customers

are exposed to information and perspectives

from sources outside the Intelligence

Community, and they expect that we will be

equally conversant. Just keeping up with the

vast amount of unclassified data available

poses a major challenge for analysts. Using

external partners to help filter or analyze information can help focus our analysts and improve

efficiency. 

Forging the Network

The Intelligence Community already takes

advantage of a wide variety of external expertise, including large research firms, independent

contractors, academics, and leaders in business

and industry, as well as military reservists and

non-intelligence government organizations such

as national laboratories. These individuals,

groups, and organizations provide information,

1 Gray information is unclassified but proprietary or otherwise sensitive information to which public or outside access is

restricted. As we enhance our outreach to external expertise, dealing with information that our outside partners deem to

be sensitive may require new policies and legal guidance. 

Chapter 7: External Analysis
72

ideas, expertise, analysis, and judgments. For

the analytic community, this results in the:

• Provision of expert knowledge not resident

in the Intelligence Community that fills

knowledge gaps and allows us to enhance

our coverage of intelligence areas and topics.

• Creation of knowledge-gaining opportunities

for analysts and the enrichment of their

capabilities.

• Augmentation of personnel when the number of inside analysts may not be sufficient.

• Creation of part or all of selected intelligence products.

• Vetting of alternative perspectives through

red teaming and competitive analysis.

• Development of new analytic methodologies.

Overall, the Intelligence Community has had

significant success in bringing outside expertise

to bear on topics of interest. Although each

organization approaches the problem somewhat

differently, and generally independently, there

is significant commonality in the type of outreach activities conducted. 

• The National Intelligence Council (NIC) has

made outreach a central tenet of its efforts to

improve the quality of its product. The NIC

relies primarily upon a network of individual outside experts to produce special

papers, conduct seminars, review or contribute to selected National Intelligence

Estimates, and provide longer-term consulting services. The NIC also manages a number of panels and committees that tap outside senior-level expertise.

• CIA consults with several hundred individual experts from the academic and business

communities, has an extensive set of analytic contracts with some of the country’s leading institutions. 

• DIA also contracts with many of the major

commercial research firms, some government organizations such as the nuclear laboratories, and independent contractors.

Nearly all of the DIA external analysis

efforts are directed toward acquiring expertise or hosting seminars on military topics in

the technical scientific and engineering

fields. 

• The Department of State’s Bureau of

Intelligence Research plays a prominent role

in outreach. INR organizes numerous seminars and conferences that enable State and

the Intelligence Community to tap the

expertise of outside experts. INR also manages the Research and Training Program on

Eastern Europe and the Independent States

of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII).

This program builds and sustains expertise

in the United States on Russia, Eurasia, and

Eastern Europe through support for

advanced graduate and language training

and post-doctoral research.

• The National Ground Intelligence Center

(NGIC) has a long standing and highly successful program of hiring university faculty

and integrating them into the staff. 

• NSA sponsors target study seminars in

which academics, private industry experts,

military commanders, and government poli-
73

cymakers brief NSA analysts on key issues

confronting the United States. 

• The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has

a particularly active program of outreach to

the national laboratories, businesses, and

academic experts. Academics supplement

the knowledge of ONI analysts or fill gaps

where specialized expertise is required. In

addition to individual experts, ONI has special access to university experts and other

world-class government engineers and scientists.

Sharing External Expertise

The information, analysis, and expertise

obtained by the Intelligence Community from

external sources is of maximum utility only

when it is shared. Many efforts are underway

to increase cross-Community visibility and

cooperation. These efforts include networking

to identify qualified external experts and organizations as well as joint sponsorship and shared

access to external research conferences and

events. Joint conference sponsorships can

involve shared funding and collaboration on

special events or conferences. 

Many programs take great pains to disseminate

information gained from their outreach efforts.

For instance, reports typically will be sent to

interested analysts, and videotapes of seminars

or written summaries will be made available on

classified websites. Although these approaches

do not provide all the benefit of seminar attendance, they do expand the potential audience

for external commentary. 

Investment Strategy: How to Leverage the

Global Knowledge Base

Despite current successes, a number of problems inhibit the utility of ongoing external

research activities. The Intelligence

Community must:

• Make contact easier and quicker. The

ability to contact outside partners through

routine secure and nonsecure communications is critical to support routine and surge

operations.

• Share initiatives more effectively. A comprehensive mechanism is needed to alert

analysts at one agency to events involving

external experts being conducted at another.

This will increase cross-Community participation and benefit.

• Recapture lost expertise through outsourcing some analysis. The Intelligence

Community has an extremely limited ability

to identify and track annuitants who have

skills of continuing interest. Ad hoc efforts

exist, but there are no formal mechanisms at

either the Community or individual agency

levels to fill this gap. Steps could be taken

to create a database of interested retiring

professionals.

• Institute a policy framework to facilitate

outreach. A variety of policy and legislative problems inhibit the use of outside

expertise, specifically for short periods or to

comment on or participate fully in creating

Community products. 

• Establish a way to locate and tap outside

experts quickly. The Community currently

has no central mechanism or database for

identifying appropriate external experts

quickly. This makes is hard to consult them

in surge situations, when their utility may be

greatest. 
74

• Share information of common interest

about external experts. The Community

has no clearinghouse or repository of external experts either on contract or known to 

be available.

To accomplish these strategic goals, the following initiatives are necessary:

1. Build an Intelligence Community

Reserve. An Intelligence reserve could be

used to augment the analytic cadre for both

surge and normal coverage purposes.

Implementing Actions:

• Develop a Community-wide template for

our agencies to incorporate in their transition programs that would encourage individuals leaving the Intelligence Community to

apply for inclusion in an Intelligence

reserve.

• Develop appropriate contract mechanisms

and work with Congress to create legal

remedies to existing constraints on the hiring

of former employees. 

• Develop a strategy for alerting retirees to

the possibility of joining the reserve. Frame

an approach that would allow those interested to retain appropriate security clearances.

• Develop an Internet-based interface that

would allow reservists to update their contact and skills information. 

• Initiate a pilot program. Review, adjust, and

expand the program.

2. Improve interagency visibility of available

external research resources and activities.

The Community spends significant resources

on external research activities. Broadening

knowledge and understanding of these activities should ensure minimal duplication of

efforts and promote more efficient IC exploitation of these assets.

Implementing Actions:

• Create an on-line clearinghouse for seminars

and projects using external experts. This

clearinghouse will keep analysts informed

of upcoming events and convey the results

of those efforts. This site will also provide

outreach program managers the capability to

more easily exchange information among

themselves. 

• Create a database containing external

research contract efforts. The Intelligence

Community currently has no simple mechanism to coordinate its efforts for external

research. While each agency has slightly

different needs and different customers,

sharing knowledge of these research efforts

may allow efficiencies and cost savings not

available today. 

3. Develop a strategy to embrace and

exploit the emerging “information environment.” External research can be considered a

“value-added” hybrid somewhere between open

source and human intelligence reporting.

Numerous private companies are now providing both periodic and ad hoc informational

products geared to the specific interests of their

customers—some of which are agencies within

the Intelligence Community. These companies

provide not only tailored information but analysis of that information and estimates of out-
75

comes and implications as well. For their

input, such companies depend largely on opensource information. Thus, apart from the value

of their insights and analysis, these firms could

help us mine the vast amount of open source

information for the nuggets we both value. The

Community needs to develop a corporate strategy to use these external sources more effectively. Welding together these efforts will be

critical to maximizing use of our scarce

resources. 

Implementing Actions:

• Catalogue and share awareness of current

efforts to leverage commercially-available

sources of external analysis. Identify best

practices.

• Develop a strategy that recognizes the role,

criteria for use, and capability of external

partners to filter/analyze information. 

• Building on these baseline efforts, develop a

funding approach containing a list of options

and their fiscal impact—including the possible establishment of a coordinating body to

implement a Community-wide strategy for

Internet exploitation and purchases from

open source data companies. 

4. Improve communications with external

research partners. Ease of communications—

both open and secure—with external research

partners is essential to fully integrate external

research into the analytic process. To that end,

we will need an appropriate suite of digital

communications tools, including audio, video,

graphical, and textual mechanisms.

Implementing Actions:

• Initiate a requirements study, in cooperation

with the IC Chief Information Officer, that

will lead to development of effective capabilities to communicate with external partners. Desired capabilities include webbased audio/video conferencing and whiteboards to share graphical or textual information (either at the desktop, or using standalone equipment or facilities)—thus

enabling analysts and others to participate

remotely in external research seminars, and

classified and unclassified “chat-rooms.”

5. Establish competitive and alternative

analysis as a standard approach on issues of

vital national significance. Some subjects

are so important that we must make sure we

consider alternative perspectives through mechanisms like competitive analysis and red teaming.

Implementing Actions:

• Identify increased opportunities for competitive and alternative analysis. 

• Work with the National Intelligence

Council on a pilot establishing standards for

competitive and alternative analysis to be

included in the NIE process.

6. Develop a Community-wide strategy for

optimizing the benefits of our partnerships

with industry, academia, and other government agencies while protecting our secrets

and equities. The DCI identified a need to

improve the policies and procedures governing

our relationships with the outside world as a

priority in his Strategic Intent. Extensive regulations and legislation currently govern how the

Community interacts with external research

partners. We need to review these policies,
76

using security risk management and reasonable

ethical standards as a guide. We cannot make

maximum use of outside resources without

effective policies and legislation to facilitate

the integration of external experts into our

workflow. 

Implementing Action:

• Conduct an intensive Community review of

policies and legislation regarding external

research over the next year and recommend

revisions as appropriate. This review

should build upon the best practices extant

in the Community today, with an eye

toward making it easier to establish continuing relationships with academics and other

outside experts, communicate actively

through e-mail and the Internet, and

exchange ideas in a collaborative environment.