Those who formulate and implement foreign policy must continually reevaluate situations as new information arrives. And new information is arriving faster today. Global news and information sources have expanded markedly, and continue to evolve rapidly. For intelligence to be useful in this environment, it must be able to add something of unique value to the stream of external information reaching US officials. The Agile Enterprise, with its collaborative work processes and shared information access, offers exactly what the Intelligence Community needs.
Capacity is a serious constraint in the processing and use of intelligence data.
Technology for collecting and generating information has far outpaced the development of tools for exploiting information. The growth of openly available information, and the proliferation of sources for this information, are now familiar trends. The responsibility of the Intelligence Community to understand, integrate, and deconflict the disparate information coming to the US Government can only be fulfilled if the capacity exists to handle the volume of relevant data, from both classified and unclassified sources. Capacity is an urgent issue, therefore, and is being made more so by the pressure for greater speed, described above, which requires more data to be exploited in less time. Moreover, intelligence consumers themselves are struggling to keep up with the information explosion, and therefore require individual customization of intelligence support.