The Knowledge-Based Intelligence Organization
4.6 Summary
In this chapter, we have introduced the fundamental cultural qualities, in terms of virtues and disciplines that characterize the knowledge-based intelligence organization. The emphasis has necessarily been on organizational disci- plines—learning, collaborating, problem solving—that provide the agility to deliver accurate and timely intelligence products in a changing environment.
The virtues and disciplines require support—technology to support collabora- tion over time and space, to support the capture and retrieval of explicit knowl- edge, to enable the exchange of tacit knowledge, and to support the cognitive processes in analytic and holistic problem solving.
In subsequent chapters, we will detail these supporting technologies and their application in the KM environment, but first we examine the core of the learning organization’s knowledge-creating process: the analysis of intelligence data and the synthesis of intelligence products. In the next two chapters, we describe these core knowledge-creating processes and their implications for implementation in the KM environment. In subsequent chapters, we will intro- duce the tools, technology, and enterprise infrastructure necessary to support the intensely human analysis-synthesis processes.
Endnotes
[1] See, for example, Stewart, T. A.,The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization, New York: Currency-Doubleday 2002; Dixon, N. M.,Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000; O’Dell, C., et al., If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice, New York: Free Press, 1998; Garvin, D. A., Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
[2] The DCI Strategic Intent was published in March 1999. The five major objectives of the Intent and activities in each area were published in the unclassifiedAnnual Report for the
United States Intelligence Community,Washington D.C.: CIA, pp. 16–24, accessed on-line on February 28, 2002 at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/fy99intellrpt/dci_annual_
report_99_1.thml.
[3] Gannon, J. C., “Strategic Use of Open Source Intelligence” addressed to the Washington College of Law at American University, Washington, D.C., October 6, 2000.
[4] Leonard-Barton, D.,Wellsprings of Knowledge, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995, pp. 24–26, 51–53.
[5] See “Virtue Epistemology” inStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed on-line on Feb- ruary 18, 2001 at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue.
[6] Winograd, T., and F. Flores,Understanding Computers and Cognition, New York: Addison Wesley, 1995.
[7] Wisdom refers to the ability to apply knowledge to select the best ends and to choose the best means to accomplish those ends.
[8] Janis, I.,Victims of Groupthink: Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, (2nd ed.), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
[9] Davenport, T. and Prusak, L.,Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know,Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.
[10] Quoted inCIO Magazine,August 15, 2001, p. 118.
[11] Definition by the APQC, www.apqc.org.
[12] Varon, E., “The Langley Files,”CIO, August 1, 2000, pp. 126–130.
[13] Karlenzig, W., “Senge on Knowledge,”Knowledge Management,July 1999, pp. 22–23.
[14] Brown, J. S., and P. Duguid, The Social Life of Information, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review, 2000.
[15] This figure is adapted from Earl, M., and I. Scott, “What Is a Chief Knowledge Officer?”
Sloan Management Review, Winter 1999, pp. 29–38.
[16] Denning, S.,The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organiza- tions, Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 2001, pp.xvii–xviii.
[17] The organic school complements the mechanistic school, which approaches organizations as rational models subject to quantitative analysis and scientific management.
[18] Barth, S., “The Organic Approach to the Organization: A Conversation with KM Practi- tioner David Snowdon,”Knowledge Management, October 2000, p. 24.
[19] Senge, P.,The Fifth Discipline,New York: Doubleday, 1990, p. 3. See also Senge’s more recent book, The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Change in Learning Organizations, New York: Currency-Doubleday, 1999.
[20] Bloom, B. S., B. B. Mesia, and D. R. Krathwohl,Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,Vol- umes 1 and 2, New York: David McKay, 1964.
[21] Curtis, B., W. Hefley, and S. Miller, People Capability Maturity Model ® (P-CMM®), Version 2.0, CMU/SEI –2001-MM-01, Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute, July 2001.
[22] Garvin, D., “Building a Learning Organization,” inHBR on Knowledge Management,Bos- ton: HBR Press, 1998, pp. 47–80.
[23] Definition adopted by the APQC. See “Benchmarking: Leveraging Best-Practice Strate- gies,” APQC, 1995. Accessed on-line on March 8, 2002, at http://apqc.org/free/whitepa- pers/dispWhitePaper.cfm?Product ID=663.
[24] Davenport, T. and Prusak, L.,Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, Chapter 5, “Knowledge Transfer,” Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998, pp. 88–106.
[25] The terminology here is adopted fromDistance Learning, Army Science Board, 1997 Sum- mer Study Final Report, December 1997, pp. 6–7, 16.
[26] This is a question of the degree to which groups of individuals can thinkcollectivelyand coherently. The fact and efficiency of group communication, interaction, influence, and coordination is not in question; the existence or meaning of group cognition (groupthink) is the issue in question. See the divergent views in Smith, J. B.,Collective Intelligence in Computer-Based Collaboration,Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1994; and New- ell, A.,Unified Theories of Cognition,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
[27] Intelligence Community Collaboration, Baseline Study Final Report, MITRE, December 1999, Section 3.2.2, accessed on-line on April 20, 2002, at http://collaboration .mitre.org/prail.
[28] Fisher, B. A., and D. Ellis,Small Group Communication(3rd ed.), New York: McGraw- Hill, 1990.
[29] By mindset, we refer to “the distillation of the intelligence analyst’s cumulative factual and conceptual knowledge into a framework for making estimative judgments on a complex subject.” Mindset includes a commitment to a reference viewpoint on a subject; creating a mindset is a vital and indispensable element of human reasoning but introduces a bias against contradictory evidence or competing mindsets. See Davis, J., “Combating Mind- Set,”Studies in Intelligence,Vol. 36, No. 5, 1992.)
[30] The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® is a psychological instrument to characterize an indi- vidual’s personality type based on a generalization of Carl Jung’s (1875–1961) psychology of personality types. The MBTI® is a questionnaire trademarked and copyrighted by Consulting Psychological Press (1962) that may be used to define a Myers-Briggs type of an individual. The Keirsey temperament model (1978) is a similar classification scheme that distinguishes more subtle features of temperament (interests, orientation, values, self- image, and social roles).
[31] See, for example, the analysis of a collaborating group in Leonard, D., and S., Straus,
“Putting Your Company’s Whole Brain to Work,” inHBS on Knowledge Management, Boston: HBR Press, 1998, pp. 135–136.
[32] Churchill, E., D. Snowdon, and A. Munro (Eds.), Collaborative Virtual Environments, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2002.
[33] Groove Product Backgrounder White Paper, Groove Networks, Inc., 2001, accessed on- line on February 15, 2002 at http://www.groove.net/pdf/backgrounder-product.pdf.
[34] “Intelligence Analysis for the 21st Century,” speech by John C. Gannon, (Former) Dep- uty Director for Intelligence, CIA, at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, November 18, 1997, accessed on-line on January 31, 2002, at http://www .odci.gov/cia/di/speeches/42826397.html.
[35] Richard, A. O.,International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery and Organized Crime, U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research, DCI Center for the Study of Intelligence Monograph, Washington, D.C.:
CIA, November 1999.
[36] We purposely include predominantly convergent (thinking to narrow choices to arrive at a solution), rather than divergent (exploratory or creative thinking) methodologies of thought here. Divergent creativity is required to synthesize hypotheses, andlateralcreative thinking methods (e.g., see Edward DeBono’s Serious Creativity, 1992) are certainly required within the processes described in this chapter.
[37] Descartes, R.,Discourse on Method,1637; his four-step problem-solving method of analy- sis and synthesis is described in “Part II—Principal Rules of the Method.”
[38] Kepner, C. H., and B. B. Tregoe,The Rational Manager, Princeton, NJ: Kepner-Tregoe, 1965.
[39] Waltz, E., and J. Llinas, Multisensor Data Fusion, Boston: Artech House, 1990, pp. 419-423.
[40] Sawka, K., “Competing Hypothesis Analysis: Building Support for Analytic Findings,”
Competitive Intelligence Magazine, Vol.3, No. 3, July–September 1999.
[41] Lockwood, J., and K. Lockwood, “The Lockwood Analytic Method for Prediction (LAMP),”Defense Intelligence Journal,Vol. 3, No.2, Fall 1994, pp. 47–74.
[42] Decision analysis is an entire discipline of its own, encompassing a broad set of quantita- tive analysis approaches to arrive at decisions. For an overview of this field, see Watson, S.
R., and D., M. Buede, Decision Synthesis, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
[43] Philosophers characterize a number of approaches to thinking about the world and attrib- ute these classics to their most well-known teachers: Isaac Newton (1642–1727) intro- duced the concept of mechanism that explained causality in the physical world, René Descartes (1596–1650) introducedreductionismto decompose systems into parts for inde- pendent analysis, and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) introducedempiricism,whereby the sys- tems of nature are observed and explanations (hypotheses) synthesized and then tested (the scientific method).
[44] Casti, J. L., Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Sur- prise, New York: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 3.
[45] Ellis, J. O., CINC U.S. Naval Forces Europe, Commander Joint Task Force Noble Anvil,
“A View From the Top,” After Action Briefing, July 4, 1999, accessed on-line on May 25, 2002, at http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/ppt/ellis_kosovo_aar.ppt.
[46] Kline, G. A., Judith Orasanu, and Roberta Calderwood (eds.),Decision Making in Action, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993.
[47] “CIA Opens Door on the Craft of Analysis,” Center For Study of Intelligence Newsletter, No. 7, Winter-Spring 1997. The CIA Directorate of Intelligence made available to the public a reprinted and revised edition ofA Compendium of Analytic Tradecraft Notes, Vol- ume I (Notes 1–10),which have become a standard reference within CIA for practitioners and teachers of intelligence analysis. The revised compendium contains 10Tradecraft Notes issued to analysts during March–December 1995.