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Day Three of the Synergy Conference

This is the third and final post on some observations from the 2008 Synergy conference (co-hosted by Stratcom).

The day opened up with a great update on operational intelligence in the modern age, with Mr. John J Powers of the Defense Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) providing a first hand look at the DIOCC, its mission, and recent successes.   The question and answer period generated some great dialog and feedback and suggestions from some of the greats in the community, including Mr. Terry Casto and Ms. Lynn Schnur. 

JJ's discussions were followed by a panel of CTO-types introduced by Ms. Nancy Wheeler of the GETA.  Panelists included Mr. Malcolm Hyson (CTO Microlink LLC), Dr. Alex Karp (CEO Palintir Technologies), Dr. John Triechler, CTO Applied Signal technology), Mr. Guljit Khurana (President and CEO, Centrifuge Systems) and me.   

Our panel was followed by the highlight of the day, a presentation by Dr. Prescott Winter, CTO of NSA.  I capture some more detailed notes on his presentation below.

Dr. Winter was followed by CAPT Eva Scofield, the Director of Intelligence (J2) for JTF-GNO.  This is the position I held from Dec 1998 till 2002.  She did a great job of characterizing the threat.  I hope all were listening and I hope the world remains alert and focused on this growing menance.

Closing comments were provided by the Stratcom's Director of Intelligence (J2), Captain Jeffrey L. Canfield, USN.  Unfortunately, I had to miss that presentation to catch a flight. I imagine Jeffrey did his usual great job of both extracting the key points of an entire confernece and drawing conclusions we should all take away.  I'll have to get with him later to see if he can get me up to speed.

Notes from Dr. Winter's presentation:

Dr. Prescott Winter, CTO/CIO of NSA, provided an overview of the NSA IT story and the many changes to the way we do business.   He provided a very good, succinct vision and a compelling argument for continued change towards integration.  He is fully aware of the great progress that has been made to date and does not discount that. But he knows more needs to be done and is helping us all move forward.   We need to move more users into an integrated ops intel space where new information models can be used.  The SIE, Single Integrated Environment, for example, is a new model and new operating environment.

A key vision has been to integrate what users see with what intelligence knows.  This is an integrated ops/intel space that is serving the mission with an integrated picture that wraps the user.  He is moving towards this vision by engaging today's architecture and looking for gaps and addressing those, engaging with industry to know more about the future of technology and how they can address gaps, integrating the NSA investment programs (as you identify stacks of services you must have investment plans that appropriately resource and optimize them).  he is also engaging technologists from throughout the organization by working with PEOs and the AE of NSA.

Pres is working hard to move NSA from a net centric model to an info centric model.  He is also changing the access model from compartment based to attribute based.  On the issue of data  ownership, he is doing everthing he can to change the old model of data ownership to data stewardship.  This is a behavioral issue.  On the issue of SOA and Services, he is moving the entire stack of IT to a services model. 

Pres is a champion of the ODNI's info sharing strategy and vision and is working hard to help execute and implement.  He is working hard to change attitudes and behaviors from need to know to need to provide.   He is working to engineer solutions that will help make data discoverable and available to every member of the selected community that needs that information.

Day Two of the Synergy Conference

Today's sessions were an interesting mix of professionals from throughout the community.  Some of the most interesting dialog was on organizational models of senior staffs.  

For many years military strategists have pondered the best model for ops intel integration on senior staffs.  The introduction to the argument generally mentions that the dominate structure today is like Napoleon's staff.  Those who advocate keeping this model and those who advocate merging ops and intelligence into the same organization generally share the same goal of support to the mission and support to operational decisions. 

Among COCOMs it was SOCOM that first began advocating for and then changing their staff to ensure tight organizational coupling and then integration of ops and intel, and they were successful, perhaps because of their mission orientation and leadership of seniors on their staff.  But I also have to point out that over time their organizational model actually returned to something that Napoleon would recognize today, and there is a strong intelligence function on the SOCOM staff.    STRATCOM has also been a command famous for forward thinking and adjusting to accomplish new missions assigned to them.   Tremendous progress in modernizing old command constructs was made over the last several years.   A key lesson learned from that, however, is that many of the steps taken had the unintended consequence of lessoning the ability of intelligence to support the mission, and no one wants operational commanders to be served with sub optimized intelligence.

The good news is STRATCOM has seen that and is taking steps "to return the J2 position to the importance it once had" (see yesterday's post). I should also point out that on the CENTCOM staff, which is coordinating and executing some of the most critically important operations the nation is conducing today, there is a very strong J2 function.  Ops and intel are functionally integrated at CENTCOM but it is a strong J2 that ensures the integration, not  experimental approaches to organization.  At CENTCOM, like at other operational staffs, the commander would never give up his J2.  That position is critical to victory in the most important theater of operations.

Many organizations integrate ops and intelligence and do it well.   For example, JSOC or CIA.  Both are very operational organizations with very key intelligence missions, and both have long had and integrated ops/intel way of working. 

We heard today of the SOUTHCOM model.  There may be some great reasons for change there.  They operate and plan for operations in a theater that is unique for many reasons.  I don't have enough info to judge what they are doing, but I hope they are learning lessons from folks like General Ennis and SOCOM and CENTCOM and STRATCOM.   

The highlight of the day, and maybe of the entire conference, was a panel and discussion the presentation on Web2.0 and enterprise services.   The panel was moderated by Mr. Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia and Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist in the Directorate of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency.  His panelists included Mr. Drew Herrick, Deputy Technical Executive, Office of the Americas, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Mr. Scott Yaroschuk, lead for Emerging Technologies/Collaboration for the Joint Staff J6, and Mr. John Hale, Chief of Solutions Delivery for the Intelink Management Office (which some now call the Intelligence Community Enterprise Solutions (ICES). 

Sean provided a great overview of some of the Web2.0 capabilities the community is working with today, including:

    * One of a suite of Web 2.0 tools including:
          o Intellipedia for aggregation
          o Intelink blogs for communication
          o Tag|Connect (similar to the Internet's del.icio.us) for organization
          o Inteldocs (a document management system for file sharing community-wide)
          o Gallery (similar to the Internet's flickr)
          o iVideo (similar to YouTube)
          o Intelink Instant Messaging (IIM)
          o Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Although as a technologist I really appreciated his discussion of capabilities.  Perhaps more important lesson was his capturing of three core principles for social software in the Enterprise.  Three he lists are:

   1.  Work at broadest audience possible
   2. Think topically, not organizationally
   3. Replace existing business processes

Although Sean graciously credits ongoing Enterprise 2.0 academic studies with helping to codify these principles, I could tell he was speaking from the heart about them and the anecdotes he mentioned underscoring their importance.

Scott Yaroschuk continued to build on the presentation with real world examples of the use of these tools to improve and replace existing business processes on the joint staff.  This change to business process is the greatest benefit of these Web2.0 tools.   Drew Herrick provided example after example of communities of people coming together to solve hard challenges using these new tools, and every example underscored the key lessons Sean mentioned at the beginning of the presentation.

John Hale then led a standing-room only crowd through an in-depth examination of each of the Web2.0 tools provided by ICES.   These capabilities are really changing the way things are done in the federal space. 

Other presentations this day included a briefing/status report on the Secure Enterprise Datavault by Ms. Kristin O'Keefe of Army G2.   The SED will be the first accredited mulit-level secure data repository for use throughout the DoD and the IC. 

There were many other presentations today and many technology demos.  I'll blog more on them later

Day One at Synergy Conference

This post provides a summary of day one of the STRATCOM Synergy conference.  The conference is focused on integrating combat ops/intelligence implications for national intelligence processes.   Conference leader Brigadier General Billy Bingham (USAF, ret) opened the conference by reviewing what was discussed last year’s Synergy conference.  He also laid out the goal for this year’s conference, to keep moving things forward and to ensure we are “Integrating operations and intelligence so we can achieve our nation’s objectives in the most efficient means possible. ” 

The morning included a presentation by the STRATCOM J5 (Brigadier General Mark Owen).  He was followed by Major General Michael Ennis, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Services for community HUMINT at CIA. The afternoon was filled with discussions and briefings that brought home the perspectives of operators from the Ops/Intel world, including a panel filled with ops/intel professionals which discussed lessons learned.  Perspectives on ops/intel synergy on the front lines were provided by a seasoned Marine Corps professional.   Key areas where ISR models clash were highlighted by a seasoned Air force ISR Colonel.   An update was provided on army operational intelligence.

The following provides some takeaway’s from the discussions:

Brigadier General Owens mentioned the many missions of STRATCOM, including nuclear deterrence, and also cyberspace.  In his view, STRATCOM’s mission in cyber is to ensure freedom of action in cyberspace.  He also signaled a strong intention of the Commander, STRATCOM to return the J2 position to the importance it once had.   He also signaled a strong intent to do that while integrating ops and intel into the mission.  He talked about the terms he likes to use, those of intelligence and warfighters, since the operators are warfighters.  

General Ennis gave personal stories underscoring how important it is for ops and intel to work together.  He said great staffs have always worked that way and now at CIA it is all ops and intel together, at JSOC it is all ops and intel together.  He thinks it is wrong to use the old models of ops and warfighters.   That too frequently forces a separate structure.  In the old days there was an ops cell and an intel cell and they were separate.  Today, in efficient operations, the intel and ops cells are together.  General Ennis is a strong believer in new tools and thinks three in particular are dramatically changing the way we are working together.  Blogs, Wikis and the class of tools that lets users go after content in search vice just headlines.   By Blogs and Wikis he meant the many open source/Internet based wikis that can provide context and situational awareness.  For example, the MCIA cultural intelligence initiative makes extensive use of these tools.   He also provide some thoughts on the term “information sharing.”  There are things he doesn’t like about that term because sharing implies the data is yours to own and to decide when to share.   He believes in joint interagency platforms for ensuring responsiveness, relevance and unity of effort.   Regarding Open Source, he would like to see an interagency open source center that is focused on hard problems.   Regarding IT, he believes a common IT backbone is critically important to mission success. 

The afternoon speakers hit on many great topics related to ISR and the different cultures in the Services and how they clash over ISR.  There were many great stories and lessons, and several meaty recommendations.  But the bad news is all the stories sound the same as they have for years and the lessons learned are the same ones we have been relearning for years.  I guess the point of the conference is that we need to embody those lessons somehow.

More later