Intelligence community to reboot security

The intelligence community is turning to Defense services and agencies, as well as representatives from industry and academia, to help them overhaul their outdated and ineffective certification and accreditation processes.This month, personnel will begin receiving invitations to participate in one of two teams—a green team and a gold team—that will ultimately make suggestions on how to improve certification and accreditation processes across the intelligence community.“We’re going to have a good old-fashioned tent meeting,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, associate director of national intelligence and CIO of the intelligence community. He described the program at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems Worldwide Conference, held recently in Dallas. “We’re hoping that through this bit of ingenuity, we can tap the best minds from across the business. We need to have this kind of effort to make intelligence better.”Meyerrose said he is working with John Grimes, Defense CIO, on the initiative and that the outcome will help the intelligence agencies and components within the services reduce the time needed to certify and accredit standards and systems. He said the teams also would help the intelligence community become more inclusive.“We need less local policies and more communitywide policies,” Meyerrose said. “We need less local standards and more communitywide standards.”Grimes agreed, stressing that to harmonize the certification and accreditation processes across DOD and the intelligence community, you must begin with an enterprisewide approach.“We believe the best way to provide net-centric enterprise capabilities is through net-centric enterprise processes,” Grimes said. “As we implement enterprise architecture, portfolio management, enterprise systems engineering, and enterprise operations and management, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need a complementary net-centric, enterprise-oriented information assurance certification and accreditation process.”Meyerrose said the reforms are part of the federal overhaul of the intelligence community and are consistent with the National Intelligence Strategy of the United States, released in October by John Negroponte, director of the Office of National Intelligence.“We have to make intelligence fast, agile and transparent,” Meyerrose added. “It doesn’t do us any good to deliver the right information to the right place, but not in the nick of time. But it’s not just about the speed of delivery of intelligence, it’s the speed in which we bring innovation.”Throughout the DODIIS conference, intelligence officials discussed how DOD is restructuring agencies for efficiencies. Part of this restructuring occurred April 3, when Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on establishing a Defense Joint Intelligence Operations Center. DOD established the center, managed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, to integrate and synchronize full-spectrum intelligence operations on behalf of the combatant commands.DOD’s enemy is decentralized, networked and unpredictable, said Michael Pflueger, CIO of DIA. To better fight this enemy, ODNI is restructuring the intelligence community into an integrated, joint enterprise with a focus on getting information to warfighters quickly.“Our current enemy is very agile. He goes from Internet cafe to Internet cafe. We have to be just as efficient,” he said.The restructuring will also help intelligence agencies get rid of data duplications and provide intelligence data to warfighters quicker by consolidating functions and becoming interoperable, Pflueger said.The DJIOC will be housed at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, with final operational capability expected by December 2007.“The DJIOC facilitates intelligence planning to bring analysts and collectors together,” added Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of DIA. Maples called DJIOC “a major transformational initiative” and said it will help intelligence agencies better fuse information and operations.Another portion of the intelligence community restructuring includes a move by DIA to take over operational control and IT management for the combatant commands. Officials say the move was designed to control the commands’ IT spending while centralizing management of Defense information systems. Some of the work will be completed later this year.Eventually, Defense employees will be measured by how successful they are in integrating processes.“Ultimately there will be metrics that will measure our success in meeting these objectives,” Maples said. “This will drive us in terms of resources. We’re going to be driven by the customer.”The mission of the DJIOC will be integrated with the Joint Functional Component Command for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JFCC-ISR), a command established six months ago with a global focus on ISR planning and asset allocations. JFCC-ISR will be jointly housed with DJIOC.The Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Intelligence Strategy are lead drivers of these initiatives, officials say.“A comprehensive IT infrastructure is an imperative,” Maples said.Standing in the way of this are policies, processes and procedures that are outdated and often not integrated.“We’ve got to eliminate the impediments to progress,” Maples said. “There are impediments to progress that are keeping us from achieving what we hope to achieve. We are still stuck in vertical stovepipes: our policies, our processes and our procedures. We’ve got to move to a horizontally integrated capability.”