Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

CHAPTER NINE
As the resources available to intelligence analysis are limited, it needs to be
determined if those resources are better spent on the reporting functions of the
Intelligence Community or on warning functions. It also needs to be determined
whether these functions should be performed by the same analysts or if
they are two separate career tracks. To make this determination, the Intelligence
Community will need to invest in what I call a Performance Improvement
Infrastructure as well as basic and applied analytic research.
Performance Improvement Infrastructure
The first step in improving job or task-specific performance is the establishment
of a formal infrastructure designed explicitly to create an iterative performance
improvement process. Such a process would include:
• measuring actual analytic performance to create baseline data;
• determining ideal analytic performance and standards;
• comparing actual performance with ideal performance;
• identifying performance gaps;
• creating interventions to improve analytic performance;
• measuring actual analytic performance to evaluate the effectiveness of
interventions.
Several organizational, or infrastructure, assets should be developed to support
this process. These should include:
• basic and applied research programs;
• knowledge repositories;
• communities of practice;
• development of performance improvement techniques.
The performance improvement process would be repeated throughout the
life cycle of an organization in order to encourage continuous improvement.
With the infrastructure and process in place, an organization would be capable
of adapting to new or changing environmental conditions.
Infrastructure Requirements
Institutional changes, such as corporate reorganizations, are often enacted
without a clear understanding of their potential or actual impact. What is most
often missing in such changes is a basic research plan or a systems approach
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