Intelligence Community Embraces 2.0

The United States Intelligence Community consists of 16 government agencies, each involved with distinct aspects of U.S. intelligence. The agencies are organized under the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position created to facilitate better cross-agency collaboration as recommended by the 2004 9/11 Report.I had the pleasure of speaking with Don Burke and Sean Dennehy from the CIA about the Intelligence Community's use of technology to embrace greater openness and collaboration and was surprised to learn how much is already underway at the CIA and other agencies.Don and Sean have become advocates of Enterprise 2.0 not only for the CIA but for the entire Intelligence Community, and have been driving towards wider adoption. Much of their effort has been around Intellipedia, the cross-agency wiki built on the MediaWiki platform. But the two also described extensive efforts around blogging, RSS, social tagging, social bookmarking, video content and instant messaging. What I find remarkable is the adoption of these tools built to socialize information amidst organizational cultures that are entrenched in a "need to know" basis. I've written about a couple similar examples here and here. If the Intelligence Community and companies like Lockheed Martin can tap Enterprise 2.0 to benefit their organizations then surely less sensitive businesses can do the same.