Manny Wilson of CENTCOM shares the latest on Intellipedia

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.

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