Haft of the Spear

Wertheimer said the intelligence community is taking analysts with less than five years of experience [that would be a large portion of the workforce – MT] and putting them through a two-year program to build interdisciplinary teams to act as an information channel between the intelligence community and federal organizations worldwide.

RASER is one of many approaches ODNI and others are implementing to attract, retain and better train intelligence analysts.

I honestly don’t see the purpose in such a program. Someone enlighten me. How is this not just a formalization of the standard practice of pulling people from term positions to surge against current requirements? If the goal is going multi-disciplined, you don’t need a formal program for that, you just need a mission manager with the wherewithal to request the right people (more accurately, people from the right discipline – you’re never going to get “the right” people because their current bosses will chew off their arms before they let them go). Fly-away teams – which is how this reads – doesn’t buy you anything but people with deep functional but no target expertise. Someone school me, please.

Other initiatives include moving to a pay-for-performance system that matches the Defense Department’s National Security Personnel System …

New paper – and what I hope is an original take on pay-for-performance – coming soon.

“We previously had a great focus on publish or perish and that led to a reward system that recognizes the individual not the collective effort,” said James Clapper, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and director of Defense intelligence. “We must focus on the quality not the quantity of what analysts produce. We need metrics that will show the impact of the reports.”

I know what he’s trying to say, but the phrasing sends the wrong message. If you are a star, you should be rewarded accordingly. That teamwork was not encouraged in the past doesn’t make exceptional individual efforts less important now that it is. Some things don’t lend themselves to group efforts, so is the stellar individual going to suffer if she produces a groundbreaking work on her own? The way the pendulum swings in this business, could be.

That said the “metrics … impact” statement is right on. Build that EBay-seller system into Intellipedia and classified blogs are you’re on your way.

[Clapper] also said using academic centers of excellence, developing analytics courses at colleges and universities for would-be analysts, and continuing to make the intelligence process collaborative are important steps to transformation.

Jim (can I call you Jim?), you’re not thinking big enough. Using colleges as farm teams is a process as old as the hills; you need to start thinking of them as adjuncts. You need to funnel contract money to places like Mercyhurst and other IC-CAE schools so that they can do a lot of the OSINT work for you, then turn it over to the “inside” for them to roll in the secrets. Get them to set up and maintain a (U) version of Intellipedia; send them a scrubbed version of the NIPF to use as suggestions for theses and dissertations … all sort of opportunities here besides just serving as a hiring pool.