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. So, more data needs to be exploited in more customized products in less time.
Flexibility is a major issue for intelligence today.
Intelligence has to adjust to these shifting priorities without degrading its long-term efforts on the most serious threats to national security. The Intelligence Community is under pressure to reduce the cost of shifting priorities, and reduce the time it takes to ramp up to meet sudden customer needs. Readers will recognize in this intelligence challenge the same need for flexibility that led to concepts for an Agile Enterprise in the private sector. The need for greater speed, capacity and flexibility is pulling each of the separate intelligence agencies toward greater use of on-line networks, more use of collaborative work processes, and more shared access to data all core elements of an Agile Enterprise even without any formal consensus to move in this direction together. In the pages that follow, Fredrick Thomas Martin provides a context and guidance for thinking about the additional breakthroughs that can be gained if the Intelligence Community pursues these concepts as a collective strategy.