How We Work: The CIA 2.0 Uses Wiki Software to Share Information

The famously hierarchical, secretive organization now fosters the sharing of classified information on networks accessible to agents around the world.

What do Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, have in common? They both use the same free wiki software to share knowledge and foster collaboration. The CIA, that famously hierarchical, buttoned-down organization—an organization, after all, that specializes in keeping things secret—is actually using off-the-shelf free software to promote an open environment in which intelligence workers can independently contribute and share information. Career CIA workers initially scoffed at the idea of an internal wiki, but Intellipedia, which got its start in 2006, has steadily been gaining support within the agency.

Wikis basically are websites that allow users to collaborate by in several ways: they can add information to existing pages, add new pages, comment on a page’s information on a discussion tab, and edit other’s information to correct or augment what is already there. Originally developed by Ward Cunningham in the 1995, wiki software’s most famous instantiation is of course Wikipedia. Many free and commercial versions of wiki software are now available.

A Learning Organization

In recent years, several developments have forced the CIA to examine its own processes and change the way it operates. The high-profile intelligence failures surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the information regarding Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” put intense pressure on the agency to rethink the way it gathers and analyzes data. In addition, information from around the globe flows so quickly today that government officials must often make decisions based on fresh data within a matter of minutes, not days. Rapid response is requisite for operating under today’s uncertain and often volatile conditions.

In 2004, these developments prompted one CIA worker, Calvin Andrus, to write an influential paper, “Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” Essentially he proposed that the CIA transform itself into a learning organization, prepared for rapid, continuous, and sometimes unpredictable change. The established way of reorganizing is both predictable and slow, Andrus asserted: “We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.”

Complex Adaptive System

Andrus boldly argued that the CIA should become nothing less than a complex adaptive system, with the following standard characteristics:

Self-organization—Individuals decide on their own how to act but in similar ways based on their proximity to one another.

Emergence—The whole system is something greater than the sum of the parts.

Relationships—Individuals look to their nearest neighbors to try to analyze what is occurring so they can make decisions.

Feedback--Information is created, gets modified by others, and flows back to the originator, thereby influencing behavior and thinking along the way.

Adaptability—Information flows in and out of an open system that has feedback loops that influence system behavior in positive or negative ways.

Nonlinearity--Small changes can have large and unpredictable effects (the butterfly effect).

The Big Shift

To promote these principles in the CIA, Andrus proposed the following:

More autonomy--Intelligence officers should be encouraged to act more on their own.

Continuous learning--They need to continuously improve their skills in espionage activities.

Share information--Intelligence officers must share more information across agencies and around the globe.

More feedback--Intelligence officers need more feedback from their national security environment so that they can learn and adapt to changing conditions.

2.0 Technologies

The CIA needs newer technologies, Andrus said, especially the wiki and the blog because both of these new technologies support the building of self-organizing communities by sharing knowledge. Now two-and-one-half years after its inception, there are 35,000 members of this online community, with three levels of access: unclassified, classified, and top secret. According to their clearance level, users can create, add to, and access tens of thousands of topics. It has become, in the CIA’s own words “a rich tapestry of knowledge, collaboration, and cross-agency efforts.”

Although it uses the Wikipedia software, Intellipedia is by no means a Wikipedia clone, and the ways in which it differs provide some insight into its success:

All entries and edits are signed and dated--Contributions to Wikipedia are anonymous, but all contributions to Intellipedia are signed, helping the organization track the common questions of who knew what and when did they know it. In a community where good intelligence is highly valued, workers who contribute more gain recognition and improve their standing with their colleagues.

Speed is critical--The speed with which intelligence workers can collaborate is critical to their work and although Wikipedia can take advantage of the same feature for rapid collaboration, it’s a “nice to have” for the public encyclopedia project. When the New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle crashed a plane into a Manhattan apartment building, for example, officials from the Transportation Security Administration and eight other agencies updated the information on the accident 80 times in the first two hours as they attempted to assess whether this had been a terrorist attack.

Closed networks avoid vandalism--Because it’s a private network, Intellipedia does not have to deal with vandalism, which has created a considerable time sink for Wikipedia.

True collaboration among professionals--Wiki software allows intelligence officials to join in discussion pages where analysts can debate the meaning of information and evaluate the quality of the sources and the validity of the intelligence info itself.

Introduction to the software--The CIA has also made the barrier to entry into Intellipedia exceedingly low by providing a course for workers that teaches them the basics of how to add content, start a page, edit pages, and participate in a discussion. They also learn how to set up automatic notification of updates to topics they’re particularly interested in. While Wikipedia claims that anyone can participate  (and to a certain extent this is true), one has to be ready to familiarize oneself with coding and other technical mechanisms of the software.

Centralized space for diverse info and media--Although there are some sources that are still protected, many documents, videos, and other key information once locked in separate databases and in email systems are now accessible—and searchable—in one space.

Collect organizational knowledge from workers nearing retirement--Intellipedia has also helped to solve a knotty problem that has dogged knowledge managers: how to capture the tacit knowledge of older workers before they retire and it is lost forever.

It is interesting that, like Wikipedia and other public and private wiki projects, Intellipedia thrives by having an evangelist and a core crew of about thirty people who do the bulk of the monitoring and fixing of pages for typos and other editorial problems.

Intellipedia exemplifies the best of wiki practice while avoiding the major pitfall of vandalism. Wikipedia does spend an enormous amount of effort counteracting vandalism. It seems too that a community of dedicated professionals within the same discipline like the CIA is more likely to elicit tacit knowledge and actually create new knowledge than a public forum such as Wikipedia, which brings together a quasi-random group of people with differing backgrounds, areas of interest, and agendas. Wikis are popping up in other government agencies as well, including the Department of Defense, which launched its own wiki in September of 2008 and is inviting contractors to join the collaborative effort this year.

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Links:

Calvin Andrus’s article “Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community”

The Culture of Wikipedia

Profile of Chris Rasmussen, CIA wiki evangelist

Introduction to Blogs and Wikis in the Business World