Elaine Kamarck on Knowledge Management and Intelligence Reform

America's intelligence community has come under intense scrutiny and serious reexamination since 9/11. Although the formation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security and the creation of a Director of National Intelligence were widely considered positive steps toward systematic reform, many analysts are calling for more concrete and substantive changes in the nation's intelligence community.

Elaine Kamarck, lecturer in public policy, is author of a new report, 'Transforming the Intelligence Community: Improving the Collection and Management of Information' which calls for fundamental reforms in the ways intelligent officers gather and analyze information on the new threats of the 21st century.

Q: What are the weakest links in our intelligence system, as currently structured?

Kamarck: The intelligence system we have is one in which we are drowning in information. We are drowning in data and we are severely lacking in the capacity to make sense out of that data. People that I talked to in the intelligence community talked about the impossibility of a human mind ever making sense out of the reams and reams of information that are collected.

And yet, one of the things that I think stands out in everyone's mind about 9/11 is how quickly after 9/11 all the people involved were identified. We had pictures of them; we had biographical information on them; we had their ages. This meant that the pieces to this puzzle were sitting in this vast collection machinery, and yet we had not been able to put together the puzzle or even get close to the puzzle.

Q: In the report, you cite knowledge management as the most convenient starting point for assessing reform measures. How can the intelligence community better gain access to and share the knowledge necessary for better assessing 21st century threats?

Kamarck: Knowledge management was interesting to me because it's a relatively new field in which people try to figure out how organizations learn and how they take advantage of all of the knowledge that is within them. It is a fundamentally different model of organization from the 20th century-model, where the boss at the top told everybody else what to do. This is a model where the pieces of the organization share information widely and where you're able to put together the different kinds of information that are coming into that organization in such a way as to make a better product or, as in the case of the intelligence committee, in such a way as to get closer to figuring out what is really happening all around the world.

Q: You put forth eight recommendations as a 'robust first step' toward rebuilding the intelligence infrastructure. How do those inter-relate?

Kamarck: The 9/11 commission came out with its report and it seems that the resulting recommendations were really sort of orthogonal to the analysis in the 9/11 commission report itself. The 9/11 commission report talked about processes that were down in the weeds of the intelligence community and the FBI, and showed how they went wrong. The 9/11 commission recommendations, ironically, created this great big super-coordinator, the NBI, which frankly a lot of us fear might just make the problems that were happening worse.

So our eight recommendations take a completely different tact and look at what can be done at the level of the actual workers in these organizations to increase the probability that we're going to find out information we need to find out.

So, for instance, one of our recommendations is about creating a better way for people in the directorate of analysis, or the DI, to interact with people in the directorate of operations, the DO, or the place where we recruit spies. Because what we want to be doing constantly is combining the explicit, rigorous analysis of the DI with some of the more intuitive and cultural knowledge that they only get in the DO. The Rob Sliverman report talked extensively about this, that we may not have made the mistakes we made in Iraq had in fact the technical analysis being done on weapons of mass destruction been better combined with more knowledge about Iraq and what was going on there.

So what I do in this report is take some of the concepts of knowledge management, like combining explicit and implicit knowledge, and see what they say to the intelligence community and lay out some ways to reorganize it.

Q: How should policy-makers best heed these recommendations?

Kamarck: What I would like to see the policy makers do, particularly the new director of the Office of National Intelligence, is I would like to see the policy makers lead the change in all of the 15 individual agencies that make up this community. When there's a big failure in government, the first reaction we have is to send it to Congress, and Congress' first reaction is to make some new laws.

The recommendations I'm talking about really by and large don't require changes in law. They require changes in organization and changes in practice. These are things that I think should be led from Mr. Negroponte's office and hopefully he will be doing some of those. There are already some good signs in that direction. I think that, frankly, should be their mission.

Interviewed by Doug Gavel on September 29, 2005.

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Elaine Kamarck

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