Problem
National intelligence agencies have come to realize the importance of open source intelligence that is developed using public information. Moreover, the July 2008 Intelligence Community Directive on "Analytical Outreach" (ICD-205) makes it a matter of policy that intelligence community analysts must conduct analytical outreach to tap the subject mater expertise of people in academia, think-tanks and industry when producing intelligence. The problem is, engaging people from outside the intelligence community raises several challenges relating to trust, operational security, quality control, and legal risk.
Solution
TagCite for National Intelligence is an analytical outreach solution designed to facilitate collaboration, both between intelligence agencies and with external stakeholders. The solution helps assess the validity of the reasoning and source material underpinning an intelligence assessment. The system excels as a medium for fostering critical dialog that examines the reporting and analysis. TagCite is being piloted and evaluated by intelligence agencies, think tanks, and private sector companies.
Benefits
- Makes analytical process, faster, more interactive and transparent
- Helps identify consensus or dissent and de-conflict comments between agencies
- Helps the reader access other relevant information that might be missed and combines elements from finished intelligence, raw reporting, and integrating structured and unstructured text regardless of the source database.
- Serves as a teaching and quality tool to guide the development of junior analysts.
| Before |
After |
| The intelligence production process is fragmented and overly agency- and discipline-centric |
The intelligence production process is collaborative, and mission/customer-centric by design |
| Multi-agency coordination on assessments is done by secure video teleconference, through legacy messaging systems, and by
emailing documents, with limited knowledge management and workflow support for coordination |
Provides a knowledge management and collaboration platform that the drafters of an assessment to efficiently bring together insights from various analytic shops |
| Linking data from multiple sources to support the analytic findings in assessments is cumbersome |
Leads the user to relevant information that might be missed, combining elements from finished intelligence, raw reporting, structured and unstructured text |
| Including external subject matter experts in analytical processes is a bureaucratic nightmare |
Inputs from external experts are easily integrated ,with controls to protect operational security |
| Analytic standards are pursued ad-hoc |
Analytic standards can be assessed on an ongoing basis and the analytic provenance of assessments is traceable to help prevent groupthink and to support interpretation, debriefing and review |
Mind-Alliance has been an active participant in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s efforts to engage industry in the process of transforming intelligence analysis into a more collaborative enterprise
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