1

CIA STRATEGIC INTENT

FOR COLLABORATION

D. Calvin Andrus, Ph.D.

Agency Technology Officer for Collaboration

12 January 1999

Good afternoon. My name is Calvin Andrus. I work in the CIA’s Office of

Advanced Analytic Tools. One of my duties is to be the Agency’s Technology

Officer for Collaborative Tools. A major function of this duty is to help

formulate the Agency’s strategic plans for collaboration, as well as, monitor

the execution of these plans.

The presentation I will give today is the result of the hard work and critical

thinking of many bright people inside my Agency. I want to acknowledge my

debt to them. But, I will take any credit you want to give me!

Let me also add that this presentation is off-the-record and not-for-attribution.

By this I mean that members of the press or people acting in a press-like

fashion, should not report my name, my affiliation, nor the contents of this talk

in any medium. This talk is intended for the benefit of the people here today, in

this audience. An official position for wider distribution on these matters may

be obtained through our Office of Public affairs.

In spite of these caveats, this speech is, to the best of my knowledge, an

accurate representation of where my Agency sees itself going in the future.

(NEXT SLIDE)
2

Strategic Intent

“Let me now turn to all-source analysis. . .

To keep our edge in the rapidly changing

world I described, we must do three things:

one - maintain and deepen our expertise.

Two: be better connected outside the

Agency. And three: deal with the

dilemmas of speed and volume.”

-- DCI Speech, 05 May 1998

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) gave a speech on 5 May 1998 to the

employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. In that speech he addressed a

number of areas in which the CIA must make marked improvement over the

next several years. Items Two and Three on this chart are collectively known

as Connectivity, Speed, and Volume, or CSV, for short. I have underlined in

this slide the part of the DCI speech that is relevant for my area of

responsibility.

One result of this speech was that a number of us got together and and

addressed ourselves to the issue of what exactly does it mean to be better

connected and how could we make it happen.

(NEXT SLIDE)
3

Collaboration Vision

By the year 2005, provide the ability to

communicate, coordinate, and share

requirements, expertise, products, and

feedback among consumers, collectors,

analysts, and private sector experts across

time and distance, 24 hours a day, 7 days

a week.

-- CSV Task Force, 17 June 1998

We articulated a vision of where we wanted the Agency to be in the year 2005.

By then, we want any Agency officer to be able to connect to anybody else, at

any time, from anywhere, to anywhere, on any network, about any subject, at

any security level.

You technologists in the audience will immediately recognize how easy this

will be to accomplish. (joke)

(NEXT SLIDE)
4

Collaboration Goals

• Provide ready access to expertise and

knowledge regardless of location, origin, or time

• Tailor intelligence products based on automated

consumer feedback and direct consumer access

• Facilitate virtual communities

• Drive a robust, secure, cross-platform

information sharing architecture

We translated the vision for the year 2005 into four specific goals. These

goals treat the issues of gathering information and sharing intelligence

products. The goals also recognize the business process of creating dispersed

teams that persist in time, as well as the need for some serious engineering

work at several levels in the architecture.

(NEXT SLIDE)
5

Collaboration Capabilities

• Collaborative work platform

• Collaborative product creation and

review

• Streamlined tasking and feedback

• Smart Delivery (push/pull)

In order to achieve the goals I have just listed, we believe there are four general

capabilities that must be enabled.

One is providing an IT environment that has the capacity and tools to perform

collaborative work.

A second builds on the IT environment and puts into place an internal

collaborative work flow to create our products.

The third capability engages our customers in a work flow that brings in

requirements and provides customer evaluations about how well our products

meet the needs.

Finally, we want to get ahead of the game. Rather than wait for a customer to

ask for something, we need to anticipate what they want and give it to them.

Now let me define in a little more detail what comprised each of these four

capabilities.

(NEXT SLIDE)
6

Capability #1 - Platform

• Capabilities

– Virtual teaming on

demand

– Electronic Fora across

multiple security levels

– Expert Discovery across

organizations and into

the private sector

– Collaborative toolbox

– Interoperability with nonUSG networks / tools

• Technologies

– E-mail, chat, discussion

– Shared workspaces (e.g.,

whiteboards, audio/video

teleconferencing)

– Personnel

knowledgebases

– Cross organizational

directory services

– Mobile computing

– Multi-level operating

environment

I’ve partitioned this slide into a list of the things we want to do--Capabilities--

and list of what we think will let us do the things we want to do--Technologies.

The most important capability we need to enable is the formation of teams that

are independent of geographic or organizational location. We need to move

away from the physical team rooms to the electronic team rooms. These team

rooms need to be available when the crisis happens. Thus the technology needs

to be prepositioned, so that it can be switched on when the occasion arises.

These electronic team rooms should mirror the physical team rooms. For

example, we need places to stack paper, we need walls to write on, we need

places to post signs, we need to be able to carry-on conversations, we need to

co-author papers, coordinate papers, and have our papers reviewed.

In the ideal world, we should be able to form virtual teams on any network--any

of the flavors of Intelink, for example, or even the open internet to include

uncleared industrial and academic experts.

(NEXT SLIDE)
7

Capability #2 - Product

• Capabilities

– Multi-disciplinary,

concurrent, team-based

product creation in any

media format

– Product reuse,

hyperlinking, version

control

– “Write once / Publish

many” dissemination

• Technologies

– Multiple media product

creation tools

– Embedded security/rights

protection at the

document level

– Machine assisted, multilevel product creation

– Up/down electronic data

transfer

– Application translators

– Workflow applications

When we move into the world of collaborative product creation and review,

we also want to move into a (excuse the buzz-word) “object oriented” model

of production. (Some of you here in the audience may know something about

an object oriented view of the world!)

If we want to be able to store finished intelligence objects as text, charts,

graphs, audio, video, images, etc.,

-- so that they can be linked to each other,

-- so they can be re-used,

-- so they can be distributed at different levels of classification,

-- so they can exist on the several classified networks

-- so they can be received by customers using different hardware platforms

-- so they can be accessed from near universally available software platforms

(NEXT SLIDE)
8

Capability #3 - Feedback

• Capabilities

– Accessible, shared

knowledgebases

– Direct on-line

communication between

producers and consumers

– Captured consumer

preferences/requirements

– Just in time production

based on consumer driven

demand

– Captured feedback

• Technologies

– Tasking workflow tools

– Interactive

knowledgebases

– Repositories for captured

feedback

– Activity capture and

smart audit analysis tools

(consumer usage

patterns)

In our view, an important aspect of collaboration is streamlined tasking and

feedback. One problem we have today is that when we publish an intelligence

paper and send it out, we often do not get any feedback, good or bad, on the

paper. If we knew how well our analysis did or did not hit the mark, we could

better calibrate our intelligence so that it hits the target the next time we send it

out. We hope that publishing our product electronically with built in feedback

mechanisms will go a long way to solving this problem.

Electronic feedback is the beginning of a collaborative discussion about the

substance of a paper that could easily turn into more focused tasking from the

customer.

As we accumulate the feedback we get from customers, we believe we will get

smarter about how to anticipate the intelligence needs of our customers that

will lead us to “just-in-time” and “just-enough” intelligence.

(NEXT SLIDE)
9

Capability #4 - Delivery

• Capabilities

– Proactive delivery of

intelligence in anticipation

of consumer need

– Automated capture of

consumer activity

– Self protecting data

– Product delivery filtered in

accordance with the

data’s overriding controls

and the consumer’s

access level

• Technologies

– Intelligent software

agents

– Activity capture and

smart audit analysis tools

(consumer usage

patterns)

– Security protections

embedded at the

document level

– Delivery mechanisms for

desktop and mobile

computing devices

The next logical step flowing out of collaborative tasking and feedback is what

we call Smart Delivery. What we mean by that is getting ahead of the curve

by anticipating customer need and delivering product just as they need it,

without them having to ask for it.

We look at Amazon.com as an initial model we would like to emulate.

Amazon remembers the books I have purchased, and when I return, Amazon

suggests to me the new books they have received in which I might be

interested. When I am looking for a particular book, Amazon alerts me to

books purchased by other people who were also interested my book.

One feature I like about Amazon is that it reports for each book its rank order

in terms of sales. I can also look up the most purchased books, within

particular categories to see what’s hot. If I want, Amazon will also send me

email alerting me to new and interesting books that have come out.

As a consumer of books, I really like Amazon. I image the consumers of our

Intelligence would like us to provide them with similar levels of service.

(NEXT SLIDE)
10

Technology Challenges,

Part 1

• Robust set of Browser-based Collaborative

COTS Tools

• Multi-level Operating Environment

• Bandwidth, Bandwidth, Bandwidth

Now that I have described in general terms what we would like to accomplish

over the next several years, the question is what do we need out of the

application, middle-ware, and hardware environments.

Large scale collaboration across Agencies cannot occur until tools use a

common, widely available user interface such as a browser. Our ability to

dictate a particular client interface be used in other Agencies is non-existent.

Similarly, the resources for us to install and maintain a particular client

interface in other Agencies are non-existent.

If our Agency Officers are to collaborate with people on all flavors of Intelink

and the open internet, we need a alternative to having 5 or 6 workstations in

my office. We also need an ability to move data securely from one flavor of

Intelink to another flavor.

And what more can I say about bandwidth, besides bandwidth, bandwidth,

bandwidth.

(NEXT SLIDE)
11

Technology Challenges,

Part 2

• Tools that are encryption-aware (SSL)

• Tools that are X.509v3 certificate-aware

• Synchronous tools that work through

firewalls, or

• Firewalls that allow synchronous tools

Clearly, even on Secret and Top Secret networks we are interested in the

privacy that encryption provides.

Moreover, even on Secret and Top Secret networks we must be able to

securely and reliably identify and authenticate the people with whom we are

collaborating. This authentication must persist throughout the collaborative

session -- once at logon is just not good enough.

The firewall providers and the collaboration providers must start cooperating

as they develop their products. We at the Agency can’t be the only people

who want to collaborate through firewalls.

The fact is, we cannot use much of the COTS collaborative software that is

available today and assure ourselves that we have protected our sources and

methods with the integrity we must have to fulfill our responsiblities under

DCI directives.

(NEXT SLIDE)
121

Business Challenges, Part 1

• Interoperable, Community approach to

managing data rights, user privileges, and data

protection accountability

• Rewards and incentives for team performance

• Development of new command and control

guidelines for a truly collaborative work

environment with clear lines of authority and

accountability.

As formidable as the technology challenges are, the business challenges are even more

daunting.

Intelligence data provides our government with strategic and tactical advantages over our

adversaries because we posses the intelligence and they don’t know that we know. We

maintain this advantage by controlling the distribution of the intelligence to those who have a

need to know. Moving our Intelligence data to classified intranets requires us to clearly define

data owner prerogatives and customer privileges, in a way that the “internet model” doesn’t

fully embrace.

In addition, trying to get Intelligence Analysts--who have built their careers by being the

community expert on a particular topic--to start sharing their expertise in a team environment

will be difficult. Rewarding teams, instead of individuals, is a very different work process that

must be learned.

Moreover, we need to define rules of engagement for when a line Intelligence Officer begins

to collaborate with customers or collectors directly without the mediation of middle

management. We are concerned that the opinion of a single officer could be interpreted as an

Agency position. You can see the consequences to the Agency if a policymaker or warfighter

takes action based on personal opinions expressed in collaborative sessions, rather than on a

vetted Agency position.

(NEXT SLIDE)
132

Business Challenges, Part 2

• Work schedules that accommodate

collaboration across time and geography

• Product creation with multiple levels of access

anticipated

• Greater integration of consumer into the

intelligence process

• Mobile workforce operating in a non-secure

environment

• Technology savvy workforce and

consumer base

The traditional government work day of 8am to 4:30pm is just not adequate for a team that is

composed of officers in Bosnia, Frankfurt, Washington, and San Diego. Alternative work

schedules must become the norm, not the exception.

This kind of work will rely heavily on capture features built into collaborative sessions, not

just for asynchronous but also for sychronous collaborative sessions.

We need to institute a production process that recognizes from the start that Intelligence will

be distributed at different levels of classification. This is where you can help us with object

oriented production systems that maintain the safety and integrity of intelligence objects.

We need to let our officers to travel and still retain access to the data and people they have at

their home office, which is a major security challenge.

While we think that the workforce will become technologically savvy through training. In

reality, over the next 6 or 7 years, retirements and hiring will take care of much of this

problem. The management infrastructure must adjust accordingly.

(NEXT SLIDE)
143

What’s Next?

• Create a more formal Strategic Plan

• Write an implementation plan for 00-05

• Coordinate efforts with other IC

Agencies

• Partner with Industry to make it happen

So where do we go from here? We’ve got a great vision, with most of the

work before us.

We will be writing an more detailed strategic plan and a specific

implementation plan over the next few months, and will begin in earnest in FY

2000.

We will spend a fair amount of time coordinating with other IC Agencies.

We will also look to the commercial market to see how our industrial partners

can help us achieve our vision.

Thank you all very much for your time.

(END OF PRESENTATION)