Prologue:
 
The many independent agencies that make up the US Intelligence Community are being drawn strongly toward the concepts of an "Agile Enterprise." These concepts were born in the private sector, as companies sought ways to address increasing pressures to speed up internal operations and derive competitive advantages from their widely distributed expertise and institutional knowledge. The business imperatives were to be first-to-market with new products, to be faster in responding to customer requests, and to create solutions more tailored to each customer’s needs, or simply to reduce costs. The US Intelligence Community is feeling similar pressures today. Tight budgets since the end of the Cold War have created pressures to reduce costs, and the needs of intelligence "customers" are pushing the Intelligence Community to achieve greater speed, capacity, and flexibility than traditional practices allow. Under these conditions, an Agile Intelligence Enterprise is essential.

Greater speed in intelligence is demanded by the pace of world events and global information services. The end of bipolar diplomacy created a complicated national security environment for the United States and its allies. Diplomacy today is highly collaborative, and shaped by many different foreign perspectives and goals. The absence of an overarching military threat has left economic, military, and political agendas competing for attention. As governments continually adjust to new developments among these competing goals and agendas, the conduct of foreign affairs can shift. Those who formulate and implement foreign policy must continually reevaluate situations as new information arrives. And new information is arriving faster today. Global news and information sources have expanded markedly, and continue to evolve rapidly. For intelligence to be useful in this environment, it must be able to add something of unique value to the stream of external information reaching US officials. In business parlance, the Intelligence Community is facing a need to operate with a "shorter cycle time," to exploit the more frequent but fleeting opportunities to make a "sale." The Agile Enterprise, with its collaborative work processes and shared information access, offers exactly what the Intelligence Community needs.

Capacity is a serious constraint in the processing and use of intelligence data. Technology for collecting and generating information has far outpaced the development of tools for exploiting information. The growth of openly available information, and the proliferation of sources for this information, are now familiar trends. We should expect these trends to continue in coming years, with some new twists likely to be provided by emerging services on the Internet, interactive radio and TV, and commercial satellites that bring near-real-time overhead imagery to the nightly news. The responsibility of the Intelligence Community – to understand, integrate, and deconflict the disparate information coming to the US Government – can only be fulfilled if the capacity exists to handle the volume of relevant data, from both classified and unclassified sources. Capacity is an urgent issue, therefore, and is being made more so by the pressure for greater speed, described above, which requires more data to be exploited in less time. Moreover, intelligence consumers themselves are struggling to keep up with the information explosion, and therefore require individual customization of intelligence support. So, more data needs to be exploited in more customized products in less time. These conditions are driving intelligence toward the same "mass customization" that businesses derive from the Agile Enterprise.

Flexibility is a major issue for intelligence today. Many security threats demand sustained attention, but there are also urgent issues that arise and fade, international military and humanitarian operations that put US soldiers at risk for a time, and developments in unstable areas of the world that suddenly command high level attention. Intelligence has to adjust to these shifting priorities – without degrading its long-term efforts on the most serious threats to national security. The Intelligence Community is under pressure to reduce the cost of shifting priorities, and reduce the time it takes to ramp up to meet sudden customer needs. Readers will recognize in this intelligence challenge the same need for flexibility that led to concepts for an Agile Enterprise in the private sector.

The need for greater speed, capacity and flexibility is pulling each of the separate intelligence agencies toward greater use of on-line networks, more use of collaborative work processes, and more shared access to data – all core elements of an Agile Enterprise – even without any formal consensus to move in this direction together. In the pages that follow, Fredrick Thomas Martin provides a context and guidance for thinking about the additional breakthroughs that can be gained if the Intelligence Community pursues these concepts as a collective strategy.