Manny Wilson of CENTCOM shares the latest on Intellipedia
May 21st, 2008 by Lisa Singh
In the years since his entrance into the Intelligence community, Manny Wilson, an intelligence analyst, has advocated to senior leadership at CENTCOM on how to integrate Intellipedia and other social software tools into the community’s current business practices. In the following Q&A, Wilson talks about what’s on the horizon for Intellipedia, which recently marked its second year.
Describe your role with United States Central Command?
Manny Wilson: Right now I am an intelligence analyst. Since starting in 2006, I have been advocating to senior leadership at CENTCOM how we could integrate Intellipedia and other social software tools into our current business practices. One of the things we did to help promote this is the development of an Intellipedia course and, most recently, a social software course at the command’s regional training facility, which is modeled off others in the intelligence community. These efforts have really helped the command move into the Web 2.0 environment like Intellipedia.
What was the trigger for you advocating Intellipedia?
Manny Wilson: Reading a paper by Dr. Calvin Andrus of the CIA. I was working as a summer intern at the Office of Force Transformation [at the Office of the Secretary of Defense] at the Pentagon, and thought Dr. Andrus was on to something. Additionally, since Sept. 11, the intelligence community, Congress and the President had been trying to get the intelligence community to share information. They were trying to get the different agencies to cooperate and collaborate. There has been a lot of difficulty in how to do that. So, from a research perspective, I was interested in how to do that, and I thought that Intellipedia could help the Director of National Intelligence foster the kind of collaboration that he was looking for.
How have your efforts gone to integrate Intellipedia into CENTCOM’s business practices?
Manny Wilson: Very well. I have briefed the highest levels of our intelligence directorate, and our senior leadership are pretty big advocates. The Joint Intelligence Center, the leadership there and above, is pushing it pretty hard. The training facility, we actually have a social software course starting now at the command, so that is helping.
When I was on the Afghanistan team, several months ago, one of the things we did was attend an analytic conference on Afghanistan in Virginia where we briefed the entire Afghan community. The senior intelligence analyst on the south and central Asia section — he is a senior analyst at the command — he and I both briefed that conference. We were trying to get the Afghanistan experts across the community to be willing to play inside of Intellipedia to collaborate there instead of e-mail and actually work on an assessment inside Intellipedia, which we later did. Analysts from all of the different agencies were there. The senior intelligence analyst and I briefed about 300-plus conference attendees and attempted to get them on board to do an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan using Intellipedia.
Tell us about other initiatives on the state and local level.
Manny Wilson: I am an Intellipedia administrator on the unclassified version of Intellipedia. I believe there are about 11 administrators on the unclassified Intellipedia. One of the things that we have been trying to do on the unclassified side is to get state and local government involved. The amount of participation on the unclassified version, however, has been slower than the higher classification Intellipedias, the secret and top secret.
What are some of the key challenges to these community-wide tools?
Manny Wilson: People are scared of the tool because it is different. People tend to feel that it is some high tech tool that only young people can use. When, in fact, it is extremely simple. One could argue that this is a simpler tool than Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. The second challenge is to get people to understand that this is part of their work. A lot of times people think this is extra work, but it’s really not.
What it takes to not be extra work is simple: You have to switch from using e-mail and storing knowledge in your shared drive to using Intellipedia instead. It is really about supplementing your current business practices with more web-based tools. That is one of the main principles Intellipedia advocates have been pushing. Without that enlightened perspective and switch in processes, it will be double work.
Interestingly, I recently conducted a study on Intellipedia [and] I interviewed 10 CENTCOM analysts. One of the themes among the users of these collaboration tools was their dissatisfaction with the current information management paradigm. They detest having to go through a middle man like information managers to use the Web and post content. They expect to use the Web just like they would at home or how they use their email. That Web 2.0 switch is going to be a challenge to the community and the role of information management offices.
What’s on the horizon?
Manny Wilson: Most of the knowledge that is out there right now is on how Intellipedia is being used by analysts, but in reality the power of Intellipedia is how you get analysts, collectors, planners and even guys working inside the document shop at different intelligence agencies or the operators in the field to collaborate and synchronize their activity across these boundaries. It is a great way to store acronyms, to do planning and CONPLANS. For example, at CENTCOM the planners they have tested using Intellipedia for planning efforts.
Another thing we are trying to do is figure out how to integrate and institutionalize these tools with our more formal production processes. So, for example, I have been working with information management folks on getting the command’s websites to hyperlink to Intellipedia sites and feed content on blogs onto CENTCOM webpages. How we will ultimately link up these formal tools like websites that are controlled by information managers and these Web 2.0 tools that decentralize control to everyone, remains to be seen. We are heading into some uncharted territory.
Interview with Manny Wilson conducted by Lisa Singh
Read more interviews here: http://blog.executivebiz.com/category/interviews/
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As a fellow CENTCOM analyst and beneficiary of the Intellipedia classes, I can honestly say that this is a move that will lead the intelligence community into a very bright and very new direction.
In past years, information sharing was almost taboo. Every agency held on to the information that they gathered and intelligence that was derived. In many cases this led to shortfalls in the community and potential failures. When the community did attempt to share, it was done via a series of meetings, task forces, and liaisons which often led to a salmagundi of intelligence that was less usable than it could have been.
With the introduction of WEB 2.0 platforms, and enterprising young minds like Mr. Wilson, we face a new type of intelligence infusion.
The difficulties will be getting the community to adopt it fully and then fighting the process of intelligence by consensus, but those issues will work them selves out and we will have a terrific platform full of viable information.
While there is an outside chance that leakage information will occur, I have found Intellipedia quite responsive to the needs of the community and the design to be quite efficient for our style of work. Proper training and mentoring will encourage a stable and leak free environment.
Lastly, I will close with the fact that I have been personally educated my Mr. Wilson; I am now using Intellipedia on a daily basis and have greatly improved my products from this source. Every opportunity that a SAiC finds to bring Mr. Wilson to their town, and speak to their agents will be time and money well spent.
Thanks Manny.
Gary De Pury
United States Central Command.
Tampa, Florida