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

Related posts:

1. Day One at Synergy Conference
2. Day Three of the Synergy Conference
3. I hope to see you at the Synergy Conference
4. OGI Conference: Recommended for enterprise CTOs in the federal space
5. Social Media and Web2.0 for National Security Planners

Tags: CIA, CTO, Department of Defense, DIA, Facebook, Great CTOs, Intelligence analysis, Intellipedia, Open Source Software, Sean Dennehy, social software, SOCOM, synergy conference, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Twitter, vmware, Web/Tech, Weblogs, YouTube

This entry was posted on August 13, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under CTO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.