ICITE ready to ramp up, ODNI official says
The long-planned joint IT environment is becoming more tangible to intel analysts.
After more than two years of foundation-setting, the intelligence community is moving its project to establish a common IT platform into a new phase that includes enterprise management and advanced tools for the cloud.
Al Tarasiuk, CIO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Sept. 18, that the goal is to make a once-abstract concept more tangible by putting new capabilities in the hands of intelligence analysts.
Judging from a panel of representatives from the CIA, NSA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the endeavor has broad backing across the IC and from its top leadership. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Principal Deputy DNI Stephanie O'Sullivan have said they will stay in office through the end of the Obama administration to see the IC Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE) implemented, according to Tarasiuk.
The IC CIO offered the latest numbers on ICITE implementation: 9,000 users on a common desktop environment, with many more to come, and over 460 applications available to users.
To improve on ICITE's value proposition for analysts, Tarasiuk said officials meet regularly -- as recently as last night, he noted -- in a "Mission Users Group" to discuss their practical experiences with ICITE. The group is looking to bring "different datasets together and [bring] tools together on the cloud infrastructure to make analysts' life better everyday," he said.
The IC's short-term aims for ICITE include both developing new capabilities and consolidating those already in place. For example, Tarasiuk would like to see identification, authorization and authentication services under ICITE consolidated, moving "away from the federation that we have and bring in some additional services like entitlement services," he said.