New Tools for Collaboration by Treverton Gregory F.;

Author:Treverton, Gregory F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442259133
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

What Users Find Beneficial

Those who used the cross-agency tools on Intelink cited a handful of reasons for doing so. One was situational awareness. As one Korea specialist puts it, “I look at eChirp first thing in the morning because my colleagues in Korea and Japan have been working while I was sleeping.” A second reason is to identify new colleagues around the Community. That same Korea specialist says he hasn’t identified a fellow Community expert other than through the collaborative tools in the last five years. One NGA office uses a blog to circulate interim “publications” between more formal ones; in that way, it keeps its community together and its analysts in form. Individual bloggers use the blogs for “warehousing” and seeking comment on items not yet ready for publication. In at least one case, that of CIA’s WIRe, the tools are used for “out-reach,” highlighting items for relevant analytic communities.

Among officers who cite specific examples when collaborative tools had been useful, one cited record keeping, and another cites Intellipedia as better than e-mail or shared drives for recording his or her own information. Another official started an Intellipedia page to document a specific targeting practice. “I managed to get a lot of IC collaboration and we build some robust pages—but as time passed and we moved on to new accounts, those pages became outdated and no one updates them now.” Another started using eChirp blogs and a wiki to help spread the word about a new grassroots group. “I have found it interesting, but it seems like most people are NOT using them.” Still another’s team runs an iSpace page on strategic counterterrorism issues. One says that several officers, all within CIA, had reached out for advice about training in social psychology after having seen his or her Intellipedia page. One interviewee notes when collaborative media would have been useful: “There was a post-Arab Spring task force that constructs situation reports. It has little institutional memory. The task force does not see the use of social media as a way to ‘do things’ in order to create institutional memory. There is no way to capture history. The culture and incentives are missing.”

Another officer is very enthusiastic about using the tools for situation awareness, both to quickly get information from people and to “keep up with what is going on in the world,” particularly citing the Open Source Center’s chat rooms. Still another person says something similar: “People in the government use social media tools to ask awkward questions that challenge the ‘common knowledge’ of experts on any given subject area. Sometimes these are ignored—but when they are engaged, these discussions can become extremely useful exercises in alternative analysis.”

Another respondent finds informal blogs useful “to get a pulse of what others at the agency are thinking … without obsessing so much about perfect sentence construction and conciseness like we do in other vehicles.” Another survey respondent offers the example of getting cross-agency input on a specific budgetary question. He or

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