Understanding analytic productivity

We have been increasingly interested in the radical changes to analytical functions, and the glimmers of what could be serious new changes in analytic tradecraft best practices that might result, caused by the increasing emphasis on new fusion centers, watch desks, and other operations-focused environments.

These are environments starkly different from the typical analyst-in-a-cube model of previous generations. While they are a departure from the conventional, they are not entirely unique. One can look to many WWII and Vietnam era intelligence operations centers and analytical cells as prior examples – also focused on (then) current and contingency operations. We are even jaded enough to recall the once vogue idea of the “war room” for every crisis, taken to its highest pinnacle by the political campaign types and the competitive intelligence folks. (We recall Fuld even had a virtual training package by the same name for the corporate types).

Fads come and go. However, there are elements of enduring value to the fusion center model, else it would continually be re-discovered. Some of these may simply be administrative – reducing the friction of security coordination requirements for meetings, co-locating agencies and networks which might otherwise hide behind their insularity, or simply creating an entity with enough bureaucratic throw weight to fight for and hold its own independent analytical judgments. Others we suspect have more to do with the productivity of the fusion center environment – the energies of such places, and the pressures of the mission, are felt much more keenly throughout. Ops tempo is always higher – occasionally even approaching the speed at which crisis events or major accounts are actually moving - no mean feat, this, when most of the workforce is wedded to a 9 to 5 or shorter mentality.

In light of these considerations, we have been keenly curious as to why such greater productivity might result. We have our own theories regarding the insights created by connectivity and the effects of stimulus on analyst performance, but we also know this is only part of the answer. Other elements lie in culture, and still more in the field of cognitive psychology.

Web Worker Daily has an interesting piece on the implications of the latter for knowledge workers of all types, in reaction to an increasing media backlash against newer production models. We don’t know that we buy into these theories, yet, but it is interesting to see them surfaced and to play with them in the context of our profession. In many ways, the community is quite a bit further behind the curve in this area, as the unique demands of security and exclusivity have kept many of the mobility and multi-function innovations from rapid introduction. However, things are proceeding apace (especially in light of new demands created by homeland security and military support to tactical operations), and we expect in the coming years to grapple with the same kinds of issues.

Protective intelligence in the spotlight

Via several open media sources in the UK comes word of a the formation of a new protective intelligence unit, the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, designed for the protection of high profile principals from potential stalkers and lone assassins. The unit, apparently operating within the Met, is comprised of a mix of psychology and psychiatry experts supporting sworn police and civilian research / intelligence specialists.

At first blush, this seems like a long overdue UK adoption of a similar model currently in use within the US Secret Service, the National Threat Assessment Center. The US unit is noted, in addition to its substantive operational activities and line intelligence production, for excellent contributions to the literature of intelligence on this specialized (but vital) function, drawn from a case study method program of their own creation. They even produced an excellent introductory text a few years back, well worth the time for any professional assigned to even occasional PSD missions.

However, it should be noted that Special Branch has long held the protective services mission, and has enjoyed considerable intelligence support over the years from the UK’s police intelligence and security services. The UK’s “new” unit is likely just a new task force model with greater participation by health services experts. Nonetheless, it is another example of joint interagency fusion bringing new players and traditional mission owners to the same table to tackle difficult and enduring problem sets – something we have, and continued to, strongly support.

As the disciplines within homeland security intelligence continue to emerge and become more defined, we firmly believe that principal-focused threats will make up a significant percentage of requirements, especially in departments and agencies which may not previously have been tasked to support these needs. With the explosion of publicly available information regarding individuals accessible through low cost (or free) online services, and the growth of the politics of personal destruction, the threats to prominent individuals (even at levels far below those traditionally considered “national” exposure) will only increase.

To this later point, we are reminded that robust online collection through large scale internet exploitation may be one of the better ways at identifying early indicators of such threats – but like all such efforts, requires serious analytical strategies to avoid information overload and irrelevance. Given the recent news that others are now paying serious attention to the Jesters at the Futurists’ Court Table (in the form of homeland security taskings for Sigma), we recall an different science fiction author, Neal Stephenson’s notional approach to solving this likely analytical bottleneck through the use of expert system software designed to identify paranoid schizophrenics – and the unexpected spin-off’s that result when such software is available on the market. While the reality may never be so dramatic, the story does serve to challenge with new concepts of future intelligence challenges.

Watching the wiki grow

The following fascinating video illustrates the growth of the Wikipedia entry on the VT shooting incident over the first 12 hours.

The intelligence community still has not entirely come to terms with the impact of new tools such as the wiki, although it is making great progress in at least some forms through early adopters and the younger generation which natively embraces such technologies. We have however been disappointed by other experiments in wikified intelligence production, as much as we continue to believe that the medium offers promise in creating better options for virtual distributed collaboration in analysis and authoring.

We strongly suspect that one of the reasons Intellipedia works well is because it is essentially duplicates the functions of the now vanishing “shelfware” products and mentoring processes that previously functioned to tie together new analysts and their more experienced counterparts on specific accounts and targets. Both of these essential functions have been largely overtaken by the recent upheaval in the community, aggravated by factors including the state of permanently high operations tempo, the creation of new players of interest who lack other key connectivity to the established community, and the major demographic changes within many agencies.

Other wiki applications are not yet so clear. There have been strong arguments, and some moderate demonstrations, that the tool can play a role in replacing smartbooks, watch logs, and other “pass-down” shared documents, particularly in environments where there may be significant temporal distance between analyst shifts. Wikis have also reportedly been experimented with in coordination of exercise events, and would seem to offer promise in presenting a shared “reality” framework for simulated material.

The VT incident above highlights the potential utility of the wiki in incident management and shared situational awareness roles. The increasing proliferation of intelligence operations and fusion centers throughout the community has created unique analytic tradecraft requirements for watch officers and analysts - who typically are only taught skills and TTPs developed by their cubicle-bound counterparts.

The wiki as a tool may offer new options for the evolution of more unique tradecraft better suited to rapid analysis under crisis conditions. Interestingly, one of the first areas in which wikis might be used to contribute to such a new subspecies of the tradecraft may be in enabling structured argumentation and analysis between multiple contributors in a more explicit and transparent fashion. (Whether structured analysis methods are best suited for the operations center environment is another question entirely, but a question that has seen at least some initial attempts to examine in a systematic manner. See the JMIC Occasional Paper “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods”.)

Not all problems can be solved by the same kind of hammer. However, we are fascinated to watch the results of the continued trial and error of beating new objects against the wall. At least it saves the pain we would encounter when the only options we had was the pounding of our heads.

h/t to Bitter