The Crotch Bomber: Strategy and People, not Data and KM
Tom Davenport (who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, my alma mater) has a post on Harvard Business Review where he makes the case that Knowledge Management may well have been the most palatable solution to preventing Underwear Bomber security breach that look the peace and joy out of Christmas Day, 2009.
Professor Davenport concludes:
There are, of course, some remedies to this problem. One would be a really nasty police state, with a lot of false positive detentions. Another would be an international data management agency. A third would be lots more money and intrusiveness spent on airport searches, behavioral screening, etc., a la Israel and El Al. All seem somewhat unlikely.
Perhaps the only palatable remedy would be an intelligence community that views high-quality information and knowledge management as its primary job. If I were Barack Obama, that’s the approach I would be viewing as the real solution to the “connect the dots” problem.
I’d contend that, in this case, knowledge was too managed. And that’s the crux of the problem – too much general purpose management of data, silos, content artifacts. And too little context around discrete tasks that in actuality is what should have been manage -Where data, content and people would wrap around the task to solve it.
There’s plenty of analysis on how the billions spent on information sharing post 9/11 failed. The New York Times writes:
Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.
Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.
KM is hardly the place to start to wrestle this challenge. The problem with KM is that it’s often (not always) measured by somewhat nebulous yardsticks such as amount of shared and reusable content, amount of contribution, lowered email use and number of docs stored on the network. All of this is done in closed networks. As a result, just like we see in the enterprise and its use of Content Management Systems, the government also suffers from ‘silo-ization’, poor findability, and poor analytics. The fact is, no amount of closed loop information sharing is enough of an air tight strategy to prevent intelligence from falling through the cracks. There’s too many systems in place to let computer based intelligence automatically throw up red flags every single time.
The solution lies in putting people at the core of this difficult problem. The Social Computing Frameworks that we use, in contrast, consider the concept of ‘closed’ to be an exception rather than the rule. This allows those responsible to take ownership of the task but other unknown “experts” get to watch the flow and participate where they can enrichen the quality of the outcome or even better, as in this case, raise a big red flag. Once clear unified objectives are set across agencies, open up the execution so that the best known and unknown minds can chime in.
Whether Social Computing or traditional KM, the larger problem is with lack of objective setting to getting the right information to the right people. It’s about setting the right objectives upfront at the highest levels and identifying which of these objectives can in fact be addressed by information management solutions and frankly, which can’t. And whether the right incentive structures are in place for individuals and groups to collaborate towards a common goal. I’m willing to bet that the strategic and execution objectives laid out by the chiefs of each agency don’t line up in a way that can practically lead to a unified collaboration and intelligence discovery execution plan.
I’m afraid the crotch bomber event will result in hundreds of millions being thrown at “information/knowledge management” solutions that centers on better sharing, transparency as a strategy in and of itself, as opposed to as an execution path towards defined strategic goals that everyone is firmly behind.
I hope I’m wrong.
