“There has definitely been progress,” says Jim Lewis, a senior fellow for the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington.

Initial tasks have included establishing authority over an intel community that has historically operated autonomously and establishing relationships with a broader community that now includes foreign entities, state and local governments and the private sector.

“People sometimes underestimated the effort required to get started, but I think Negroponte has managed to slowly turn the ship and has it finally pointing in the right direction,” Lewis says. “Still, we shouldn’t take too lightly the problems that he and his team face. It’s going to be a real challenge.”

The hurdles clearly run the gamut, from cultural to organizational to technological, says Herb Strauss, research vice president for national security at Gartner of Stamford, Conn. He says previous efforts to reform the intelligence community, while not altogether successful, at least advanced the idea within intelligence circles. “The difference here is that there is now political will and public law to make real, substantial changes,” he adds.

ODNI, which came into being when President Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), is acting on its mandate. Negroponte has assembled an experienced team that’s working to implement many of the recommendations that came out of reports published by the 9/11 Commission and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The 9/11 Commission—besides spelling out the need for an ODNI-like single intelligence enterprise led by a strong CEO—emphasized that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had been successful largely because intelligence agencies had failed to connect the dots, so to speak. The commission called for fixes that would allow better information sharing among agencies. The WMD Commission urged improvements in domestic intelligence capability and analysis of intelligence. It called for 74 specific intelligence reform action items, the November elections, the new speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vowed to implement all of the commission’s recommendations.

The recommendations of both commissions and the provisions within the IRTPA, in fact, are driving ODNI’s current to-do list, and the office can already claim some tangible successes. As an example, ODNI worked closely with Justice Department and FBI officials to develop a better mechanism for conducting relevant domestic intelligence, helping to establish the FBI’s National Security Branch, which brings its counterterrorism, counterintelligence and intelligence programs under a single umbrella.

In another example, ODNI—seeking to address the need for improved information sharing and analysis—directed the data flow from 28 intelligence-gathering systems into the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). “That force feeds data about danger into all the right channels,” Negroponte said recently, during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “If we know something about terror, NCTC knows it, and by virtue of NCTC’s centrality, a hub into which all spikes are attached, other relevant authorities know it too.”

Breaking Down Walls
Clearly, the effort to create better information sharing is one of the most visible and far-reaching tasks of ODNI. By any standard, it is difficult to enable interoperability and seamless data sharing among individual, long-standing organizations, but doing so within the intelligence community is even more challenging. And that’s largely because when the government created the modern intelligence infrastructure in 1947, individual organizations purposefully were vertical stovepipes, and as a result, many have rules and closed, competitive cultures that historically work against any kind of data sharing.

“We’re going from a time when each agency, by and large, made business and mission decisions without consideration of or worry about what other agencies were doing,” says retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Dale W. Meyerrose, now CIO of ODNI. “Now the business of making decisions in the aggregate has become much more important. And so we’re at a time where organizational autonomy needs to be lessened, if not completely eliminated, because every agency, in order to

How intelligence organizations share information with one another pales when compared with how they can share information with people beyond the intel community, Defense CIO John Grimes says.

do any part of its job, now depends on some other agency for help.”

To help break down walls, Negroponte has two prongs of attack. The CIO manages all IT infrastructure and enterprise requirements and has procurement approval authority over all IT items related to the enterprise architecture. The information-sharing environment program manager (ISEPM), a position created by the IRTPA, is tasked with addressing the rules, policies, technology and cultural issues blocking the sharing of counterterrorism data within the intelligence community, as well as state and local agencies and private-sector entities.

A key strategy in this information-sharing effort is the concept of “jointness,” a term invented by the Defense Department in the aftermath of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 to effectively integrate the combat capabilities of the armed services and use joint commands to manage the warfighting mission.

And nowhere within ODNI has jointness been more embraced than in the IT realm. Meyerrose is an especially enthusiastic advocate who spent much of his military career working within unified commands.

As ODNI CIO, he tries to be progressive and innovative. He invites intelligence agency CIOs and other officials into all major decision-making processes, embarking on joint initiatives with DOD and other intelligence agencies and even challenging government and industry experts to come up with new policies, processes and ideas for handling certification and accreditation.

While jointness has tremendous benefits for overcoming technology issues, it is just as important in dealing with cultural challenges, Meyerrose says, noting that he meets weekly with Thomas E. “Ted” McNamara, the information-sharing program manager.

“We hear a lot of people saying, ‘You have the authority and the big stick with which to beat them and get them to do what you want, so why not use it,’ ” he says. “But that’s not how we see it. Our role is one of advocacy, so anybody who has an issue with something that we’re doing, we make sure to spend time on that. We’re in the business of inclusion, coming to the right decision and exerting leadership to make sure that everybody is on the same sheet of music.”

But even with that level of cooperation, the challenges of information sharing are considerable, not the least of which is the development of an enterprise architecture that serves the widest part of the community, that can scale to meet the requirements of a global operation and does the most for making intelligence better. Jointness is an important aspect of determining the right technologies for the job.

“I’m finding the level of technology to be sufficient for angling our mission and what we need to do,” says Meyerrose. “There is no silver bullet here that we’re going to buy and have everybody follow. I can find dozens and dozens of information-sharing answers in technology. It’s just a matter of figuring out which are the best ones to consolidate on and then grow into that solution.”

A second critical challenge for ODNI is the development of smart data standards, says Mike Pflueger, CIO of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “One of the hardest parts about data sharing in this community is that agencies that collect intelligence information have to protect their sources and methods,” he says. “But if the data is well-labeled, well-structured and semantically described, then all of a sudden it’s really easy to share it.”

Making Strides
An early success story for ODNI’s IT effort is its first joint program office. The Cross Domain Management Office (CDMO), developed by Meyerrose and Defense CIO John Grimes, oversees consolidation of cross-domain systems that interconnect networks of different security classifications.

There are simply too many and too many that are outdated, Meyerrose says. The goal is to reduce the number to a trusted 12 or even six highly secure systems that will allow quick and agile data transfer.

CDMO, according to Grimes, is working to establish a baseline of current capabilities and examining which cross-domain systems it should sustain, modify or phase out. Along with that effort is development of R&D requirements for new capabilities and enterprise services.

CDMO is not really focused on improving information sharing among intelligence agencies, however. Instead, its efforts are intended to help improve the ability to share information efficiently

Rick Steele
Organizational autonomy needs to be lessened, if not completely eliminated,” ODNI CIO Dale W. Meyerrose says.

among intelligence and military organizations, U.S. allies, coalition partners and the federal government. “The impact will be significant in terms of availability of information to the user, a reduction of the cost and complexity in providing access to the information and improvement in security,” Grimes says.

Another critical information sharing accomplishment occurred earlier this year when ODNI completed a project that lets British, Australian and Canadian partners access classified U.S. systems. The project expanded the number of officials with access to the Intelink sensitive but unclassified domain. According to Meyerrose, these are real breakthrough activities that have had some high-powered, short-term warfighting implications in missions where allies and U.S. troops serve together. “We can point to those successes as elements of information sharing that are fundamentally different than things that we’ve done before,” Meyerrose said during a recent Q&A session with intelligence and Defense personnel.

Meyerrose also relies heavily on the jointness concept in his bid to improve certification and accreditation, working closely with Grimes to ensure that ODNI’s C&A Revitalization Effort evolves in conjunction with the DOD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process initiative.

“It’s all about coming up with new constructs, new ideas and new proposals for different policies that will not only modernize our security policy but also bring it in line with the National Intelligence Strategy and the idea that we need to more openly share information or at least make the broadest possible use of information,” Meyerrose explains.

Jointness isn’t a one-way street, either. For example, Pflueger began consolidating DIA’s IT operations 18 months ago in anticipation of the changes taking place at ODNI. The move centralizes IT and consolidates the operation down from 11 four-star commands to five regional centers, ultimately saving significant resources and focusing systems and security personnel on the data, the tools and the collaborative efforts.

“What we were trying to do for the last 18 months is head in the same direction that Gen. Meyerrose is heading,” says Pflueger, who sits on the DNI CIO Executive Panel, as well as a joint standards committee. “Now we’re helping to make sure that he picks what we think are the best sets of standards for interoperability, and, if not, that we are in a position to anticipate so that our portion of the enterprise, the DOD intelligence community, is in line with what he does decide.”

A Long Way to Go
Meyerrose isn’t content resting on any initial laurels. He is looking for areas to improve upon and re-commit his time, attention and resources. The effort to co-locate systems within the National Counterterrorism Center is a prime example. “That is a center of excellence, and they are doing a great job, but we believe that we can make them better,” he says, explaining that just being able to cite the number of systems involved makes IT too visible and therefore a distraction and a drag on the mission. “We want to make it so that nobody knows how many systems come into NCTC, only that the right ones come in and they don’t have to fight the network in order to get their job done.”

All of this early success and enthusiasm indicates a promising start for ODNI and its ambitious goal, but Strauss cautions against overconfidence. “I think they are on the right track, but it is very early in the game,” he says, noting that the task is not likely to be accomplished quickly or by a single set of personalities. “This is a massive challenge, and the real proof is whether ODNI will survive a new administration, whether it will survive a change in leadership in terms of parties, where the emphasis is with the budget and whether there is the political will to continue moving this activity forward.”

Lewis also thinks it’s too soon to gauge ultimate success, but he sees that the ambitious goal that’s been laid out is achievable. “They probably won’t get 100 percent of what people had in mind, but they’ll get 80 percent,” he says. “And that will make things better. It won’t be perfect, but at least we’ll hopefully have a team defense rather than 16 individual players doing their own thing.”

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