Feature

The Langley Files

At the CIA, the secret to knowledge management was hiding in plain sight.

August 01, 2000 — CIO —

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY doesn't like to talk about its mistakes. It's not just embarrassing, but officials believe exposing details about how an operation went wrong reveals too much about how it captures enemy secrets. But published statements and news reports suggest one recent error—the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war last year, which killed three and injured 20—happened in part because CIA officers targeted what they thought was a Yugoslav Army warehouse based on outdated maps, and others failed to catch the mistake before the proposal was passed to the military.

No knowledge management system can replace human judgment, but CIA officials are convinced that if employees can find the information they need more easily, they'll produce better analysis and make fewer errors like this one. CIA analysts draw from tens of thousands of satellite feeds, news reports and tips from counterparts in other government agencies to produce daily intelligence reports for the president and military leaders. But if someone who isn't part of an analyst's network of colleagues has some critical data or a new insight, it's hard for him to learn about it. To protect classified information from falling into the wrong hands, the CIA discourages employees from sharing information with anyone who can't prove they need to know it. As a result, groups of analysts have erected thick firewalls around themselves, built their own systems and organized information in ways that make sense only to them.

It's this lack of uniformity that bedevils most knowledge-sharing efforts, says Christopher Olsen, chief of records and classification management with the agency. It's hard to find anything—even green beans in a grocery storeif you don't know how what you're looking for is arranged. Knowledge management experts call such organization schemes taxonomies.

"If information isn't captured [in a filing system], it goes into the corporate mass in a disorganized way," Olsen says. "Even if you put some fancy search engine over it, the likelihood of being able to get to the information you want quickly is not high." So when the CIA launched a new knowledge management project two years ago, Olsen and his boss, Deputy Director of Information Management Lanie D'Alessandro, argued for a solution based on a tried-and-true taxonomy—the system that its in-house librarians and records managers had been using for more than half a century for cataloging official agency records.

It's these records, not surprisingly, that are most valuable to analysts. As a government agency, the CIA is required by law to save documents that explain its operations, from national security assessments to covert actions. These records are organized by subject matter and timeliness under numerous categories and subcategories. Anything important enough for others to see is, by definition, important enough to store in this official record-keeping system, which also includes procedures for getting rid of outdated material.