Toward a complex adaptive intelligence community

June 23rd, 2008

I’ve written a fair amount about Intellipedia on this blog (see here for example). Many people see it as one of the premier examples of enterprise 2.0 innovation. Not many people realize, however, that Intellipedia is not just the CIA’s wiki.

What makes Intellipedia interesting and important is the fact that it takes a dysfunctional collection of 16 disparate intelligence agencies and offers up the opportunity to work as a single coherent entity with a shared knowledge bases and shared capabilities. With 50,000 users and growing, Intellipedia has some way to go. But it’s probably the intelligence community’s best option to date for migrating away from the old model where information moves vertically up the 16 organizational â€œstove pipesâ€ to a new model where intelligence flows horizontally across agencies via topical and functional communities of practice.

I raise all this simply because I learned something new today about how Intellipedia came to be. Apparently (Intellipedians feel free to correct me), the whole conversation got started with a essay contest and an eclectic researcher, Dr. Andrus Calvin. Calvin won the the Intelligence Community’s 2004 Galileo Award for his paper, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” He argued that web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs should play a central role in enabling a more nimble and networked intelligence field force–a distributed network of policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers that is continuously learning and adapting to changing circumstances. Note that he argued this in 2004 (pretty perceptive!). Here’s the abstract:

US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Recent theoretical developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990’s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our non-intelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation.

Calvin now works for an internal “startup” called iD8 (ideate) within the CIA. You can read his paper here.

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