Scooped by Shloky:
The U.S. Department of Defense's lead intelligence agency is using wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and enterprise "mashups" to help its analysts collaborate better when sifting through data used to support military operations.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is seeing "mushrooming" use of these various Web 2.0 technologies that are becoming critical to accomplishing missions that require intelligence sharing among analysts, said Lewis Shepherd, chief of DIA's Requirements and Research Group at the Pentagon.
Elaborating tomorrow. Got a Jet Li fix to satisfy tonight.
Update:
If there is one thing I enjoy more than slamming my last employer its patting it on the back. At least in this case it is deserved.
As a recent report confirmed, DIA has not been the most technically astute (among other things) place around at the working level. This is the place that thought that slapping a really crappy HTML front end to a really antiquated database was pushing the bleeding edge.
Indications that they were taking technology seriously came just a few years ago when they hired a CTO that didn't need a dictionary to know what XML stood for (unlike some senior staff with "information" or "technology" attached to their titles). If anyone was going to make something happen on the tech front, it was going to be Bob.
Still, things are not what they could be as reports on the ground suggest. It is the government, so nothing is going to be perfect, but with advances in technology have to come changes in procedure and a scrubbing of policy (insert Dilbert-esque cartoon of PHB printing off email here). Simple stuff like that that makes doing things the modern way almost twice the work of doing it the old fashioned way.
Comments (4)
It’s a move in the right direction. I read the very stringent critique of DIA in the Small Wars Journal Blog.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/02/a-wake-up-call-for-dia/
It seemed like things were going downhill there.
Posted by A.E. | February 25, 2007 12:02 AM
Posted on February 25, 2007 00:02
A.E: Government agencies are like large petrie dishes, with lots of samples cooking simultaneously. When management decrees a new change in the system, the change percolates through at varying rates.
So it’s perfectly possible for absurd practices to coexist two doors down with rational ones, simultaneously. I think half the trick of making reform stick at a federal agency is for management to stick around long enough to make it take, or reach “critical mass” on the petrie dish lattice.
Posted by Mycroft | February 26, 2007 9:24 AM
Posted on February 26, 2007 09:24
Check out this mashup
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
Posted by mt | February 27, 2007 4:17 PM
Posted on February 27, 2007 16:17
The RSS approach is particularly attractive given the massive volume of reports one must get through before more substantial work even starts. Being able to sort through a hundred data sources in a few minutes and shunting off the promising ones to a new browser window for further review probably cuts down the daily grind by an order of magnitude.
They’re creeping, but they’re headed in the right direction.
Posted by Michael | February 27, 2007 4:27 PM
Posted on February 27, 2007 16:27