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

CHAPTER NINE
analyses requires significant research expertise, ample time, and broad organizational
access.
In time, analytic performance research will become a highly specialized
domain and will require continuous organizational access not normally available
to outsiders. It will become necessary for the Intelligence Community to
establish internal or cooperative research centers in order to acquire the
research expertise necessary to analyze and effect performance improvement.
There are numerous community outreach efforts on which these centers
can be built. Those efforts need to be expanded, however, and those programs
need to include domains beyond the traditional relationship between the Intelligence
Community and political or geographic area experts. 3
Institutional Memory. The results of this research program indicate that
there is a loss of corporate knowledge in the Intelligence Community due to
employee attrition and the lack of a central knowledge repository for capturing
“lessons learned.” A number of industries and government organizations,
including the Departments of Defense and Energy and the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, already maintain centers for lessons learned as
an information hub for its employees. 4
These centers act as information repositories for successful and unsuccessful
operations and interventions. Their purpose is to reduce the amount of
organizational redundancy and levels of error and failure by tracking, analyzing,
and reporting on after-action reviews and analytic outcome data. 5 The
other primary function of these repositories is to establish networks for communities
of practice within and among organizations.
Networked communities of practice allow professionals to interact, exchange
methodological information, post and respond to individual case studies, and
develop ad hoc teams of experts for specific problem solving tasks. With simple
search tools, basic database software, and a simple network visualization interface,
any analyst in the Intelligence Community would be able to identify any
other expert whose domain specialty was needed to answer a specific question
or solve a specific problem. Another advantage of this model is the development
of formal and informal mentoring within the network. Any novice would
be able to find an expert within the Intelligence Community and establish a relationship
that would be beneficial to both. With appropriate incentives, experts
would be encouraged to contribute to the network and make available their time
and expertise for the purpose of mentoring.
3
An example of researching the validity and reliability of metrics can be found in the Buros Mental
Measurement Yearbook at the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements Web site.
4
See the US Army Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) Web site, which has links to
numerous other repositories.
5
See Chapter Six for a more detailed explanation of the After Action Review process.
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