An acquaintance of mine at DIA told me how astounded he was at the state of their technology tools when he first came to the agency in 2002. InteLink was slow and anachronistic. E-mail was far from widely accepted and utilized. Wikis were unheard of. The good news is that more senior officers now recognize that this is a serious problem, and more and more companies are tackling the issue by developing new tools for intelligence analysts. Mine included. The bad news is that change occurs slowly, and as you correctly point out, rapid change is what’s called for.

A very diligent post——the question is why do government organizations tolerate mismanagement and poor performance more so than that found in business? Could it be a self-perpetuating affliction of government in general?

One of the interesting facets of this post 9-11 period is that all the necessary security measures were in place prior to 9-11——they just weren’t used! We used to call that, “asleep at the switch.” And as you stated, lack of upgraded technology, obtuseness, and perceived competition virtually led to the 9-11 debacle.

As for the two federal organizations not cooperating, the answer is simple; create one organization with departments for national and foreign concerns and having a single management team. The current administration has, in a way, tried that with the creation of an overall intelligence czar, but that’s not going to work because there are still two separate organizations with their own administrators. Competition is good, but not in this case!

One problem related to mismanagement stems from the fact that no one is rewarded for shrinking their budget or size of their organization. If that were a rate-able item come annual performance time you would see bosses clamoring better technology and more streamlined processes. Fast-burners would be the ones that actually solved a given problem and closed out a program. Today “success” is measured in the size of bloat.

You are right that consolidation would also go a long way towards improving things. Off the bat it shrinks the size of the community because duplication becomes obvious and the size of the workforce can no longer be justified. Salary, benefits, cost to lease and/or maintain physical plants, etc. drop sharply. Inter-agency rivalry ceases and shifts to intra-agency rivalry, which is infinitely easier to deal with and costs nothing from a fiscal point of view. With more people under a smaller number of roofs the need for monster tech projects that inevitably fail also drops away.

People are getting it, but they’re still operating at the speed of government (to coin a paraphrase). Sad.

Michael, you write that consolidation of the Intel community would shrink the budgets and size, and eliminate duplication of workforce. Even with this, don’t you still need to deal with the conflicting cultures of the combined agencies or organizations? Isn’t DHS dealing with these problems now (each of the stovepipe agencies that now comprise DHS had their own cultures and methods of doing business)?

I think that this issue remains to be solved.

In the IC this is a much less significant issue than we see playing out in DHS. I’ll use DHS law enforcement orgs as an example …

Agents all go through a basic core training to become federal LEOs and then specialize. Their day-to-day functions are very distinct from one another (e.g. stopping people at the border, seeking and expelling those who slipped through, securing critical infrastructure). The cultures of the discrete organizations are different because the missions are different (we haven’t even begun to talk about FEMA, etc.). DHS has taken the Brady Bunch approach; only imagine that Carol and Mike were on their second or third iteration of familial fusion.

In the IC, in particular the all-source world, the jobs are not only functionally the same but so is most of the focus. Two guys who look at Chinese missiles at agency X and agency Y know the same information (by and large); they just answer different questions. Every agency has a different history and slightly different culture but they are all rooted in the same general experiences. There is also a fair amount of cross-pollination (people who have spent time in multiple agencies). Here consolidation would be more like Party of Five.

Nice article, Michael.

Speaking of purges, of the lack thereof, I’m disappointed that the Administration chose to promote Gen Casey after his failure in Iraq.

Sadly, the practice of holding those with ultimate responsibility accountable seems to be limited to ship/sub captains these days.