Interagency Collaboration: The Challenges Continue

Eight years after September 11th, it appears that very little has changed. With the latest attack, we return to the same discussion about the failure of our government to properly integrate bits of information distributed throughout different organizations to form a coherent view of an impending attack. In the course of that discussion, we state the obvious: we need to share. Yet we fail to address the challenges before us to make the obvious a reality.

Why is this so? One might imagine that anyone connected to the cause of improving the nation’s security would do their best to ensure that events such as 9/11 would never be repeated. Yet we all too often see actions taken by government organizations that seem at least counterproductive and at other times to be setting the stage for further catastrophes.

These seemingly inane decisions often make more sense when we consider the network landscape the organization is embedded in and the incentives present. Incentives exist at various organizational scales within the government hierarchy and lead to a particular emergent behavior. One of our greatest challenges is to reshape existing incentives in order to encourage the organizational behavior we require.

The struggle against terrorism is particularly challenging in that it requires the coordination of many aspects of national power to affect change in the long term. It is clear that government organizations struggle with effective internal cooperation. Interagency cooperation is even more challenging.

To date, one of the government’s approaches to the new threats of terrorism has been reorganization. Within the intelligence community, we have seen the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with the aim of bringing more coherence within the community. We have also witnessed the integration of 22 government agencies under the auspices of the new Department of Homeland Security. Even though new lines have been drawn, the old cultures remain and persist for years to come. Organizations with responsibilities in a given domain continue to compete more often than collaborate. So the question remains: how do we change this?

At the level of the analyst, we require two things: a mechanism to support sharing and a desire to share. In many respects, the technology to support sharing is the least of our problems. Walls created in the past to limit information distribution become constraints requiring reexamination. Even with constraints removed, the desire to share may not be present. If an individual’s performance is assessed with respect to measures of the organization’s performance, why would an individual be eager to share with other organizations that are viewed as competitors? Sharing in the absence of cooperation incentives then remains an exception, occurring only when an alignment of organizational interests emerges.

One of our best hopes for changing the dynamic may be the imposition of more transparency in the analysis and production process, as advocated by Chris Rasmussen for the Intelligence Community. By making it clear who is sharing and collaborating within the context of an environment for interagency collaboration, it may become easier to assess where the barriers lie. If a particular organization’s parochial actions are exposed, the opportunity is created for some element of the government to respond. Whether a response comes to reshape that behavior is another question.

While the social and cultural challenges loom, we remain ever eager to find technological solutions to the threats we face. In some cases, technological innovation may offer the best solution. Yet with many of the threats we face currently, there is no technological silver bullet. The problems that must be addressed are in areas where we as a nation are less adept. One would hope this would provide further impetus to improve collaboration, bringing the right people together at the right time to impact the challenges as they arise. Time will tell.