IT standards cited as key to meeting intelligence sharing goals

Information technology standards are needed to help intelligence agencies meet the objectives of a new plan to enhance collaboration and information sharing, according to a federal executive and an analyst.

The 500 Day Plan for Integration and Collaboration, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, will require intelligence agencies to develop standardized systems that enable collaboration and information sharing and modernize business practices. The 500 Day Plan builds on the 100 Day Plan, unveiled in April, which encouraged federal intelligence agencies to integrate people, processes and technologies. Both plans are extensions of the October 2005 National Intelligence Strategy.

According to the 500 Day Plan, the ODNI will move performance-based pay systems from the development stage to deployment and will implement a pilot program for improving the security clearance process using integrated, end-to-end automation and electronic transition of records.

"The [500 Day Plan] pushes for a 'culture of collaboration,' but that's a very difficult thing to achieve in the intelligence community, which by nature has to be selective about how and why information is shared," said Shawn McCarthy, director of research at Government Insights, a market research firm. "If standardized data tagging can be achieved, and if various levels of control and authority can be established over who owns the data and when it should be shared, then such collaboration [can happen]. Advanced metadata activities is a likely starting point," providing information about resources to help agencies retrieve and analyze data.

Some agencies are further along in collaboration than others. The FBI has been sharing information electronically since 1967 when the National Crime Information Center went online to support law enforcement partners across the country. For the 500 Day Plan to be a success, said Zal Azmi, FBI's chief information officer, agencies will need proper support and a unified policy.

"We must get community approval of IT standards that will enable intelligence and law enforcement agencies to deploy integration and collaboration enabling technologies," Azmi said. "We must [also] have consistent funding support of these mission critical technologies where they currently don't exist. [And] we must ensure that the privacy concerns of the public are addressed and that [personal] information, when used, is protected by any new system or application developed for collaboration purposes."

That said, the potential benefits of full collaboration within the intelligence community make the efforts worthwhile, Azmi said.

"Intelligence and law enforcement communities will know how systems, applications and data sets should be constructed," he said. "This should reduce the time needed to develop, deploy, and train our workforces to build, maintain and use these important integration and collaboration capabilities. As the 500 day plan nears, we should also have the foundation needed to drive future integration and collaboration costs down. Those savings can then be directed at the analytical challenges facing the two communities."

Other initiatives for intelligence agencies include the integration of human resources capabilities, the development of collection management tools that improve their ability to compile and analyze data, and the creation of a single information portal with enhanced identity management procedures for both agency employees and private sector partners.

"It seems ambitious, with a lot to accomplish in under two years, but it is certainly possible to deliver on the whole plan if the effort is well managed," McCarthy said. "The challenge will be managing the deliverables across multiple agencies."

The National Intelligence Strategy, which includes the 500 Day Plan, is one of a number of federal initiatives that seek to unify the intelligence community and understanding of threats to national security. Other initiatives include the Program Manager Information Sharing Environment, which links resources of federal, state, local and tribal entities, and the private sector to combat terrorism access, and the Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program, which creates a unified technology architecture to share information across jurisdictions to better investigate and prosecute criminal activity.