I saw an article title pop up in my RSS reader today that made me think “Oh no, here we go again.” The title in the news feed was “Behind US Intelligence Failures.” I immediately thought this was another re-hash of major failures to predict the course of human events. It is important for us to confront why it is impossible to know the future, so there is nothing wrong with studying and writing about failure, but I get tired of the way most in the press seem to think they could do better, and I really get fed up by cheap shots from the uninformed. But what the heck, I clicked on the link.
Much to my surprise, the link lead me to a very well written article in the Washington Post titled “The Real Intelligence Failure? Spineless Spies.“ It was not written by a reporter trying to look smart. It was written by one of the greats from the intelligence community, Mark Lowenthal. This article is well worth a read, and I hope it is debated and discussed by all citizens interested in national security.
But, this CTOvision blog is for enterprise CTOs. So I guess I better mention the hook for CTOs. This is it: Mark’s article focuses on the core mission of the intelligence community, which is to be right about our nation’s adversaries. The mission of the intelligence enterprise is not to run IT. IT in the community is done to serve the mission, not the other way around. So the first point is that Mark’s article gives me a good excuse to underscore that IT in any enterprise should support the mission of the enterprise.
The second point is that technology can be aligned to support the mission, but even perfectly designed and fielded technology cannot do the impossible. In the case of the national security enterprise, there is a need for more technology and more tools to build on other successes, and I believe these capabilities can improve the ability of people to support the mission, but to first order, leaders will always need to guide the community.
I can’t say I agree with everything Mark writes in his article, but he is writing about things where many honest people disagree. That is actually another meta point: Technologists have to architect and build for enterprises even when final decisions on the future of the organization have not been made or are subject to change. The best advice I can give any CTO in a position where an enterprise is in flux is to build for agility and build in ways that enhance the ability of humans to collaborate directly with other humans. Laying a foundation for enhanced collaboration is always a good bet.
