The CIA needs knowledge management for the same reason large companies do. No longer focused on one well-known enemy, as it was on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and under pressure to deliver better products at lightning speed, it's much harder for CIA analysts to rely on their own collections of data and personal contacts and keep up with the workload.

"We looked at what we actually kept as business records," notes Olsen, and analysts agreed that this was the information they wanted to be able to share. From there, the CIA set out to design a knowledge management system that mirrored how files were traditionally organized. The solution: something they call a "metadata repository," which is essentially a Web-enabled "card catalog" that lets end users search for information using standard fields, such as author, subject, date, secrecy level and each file's original recipients. Most of this data is already supposed to be collected for record-keeping purposes, although a recently released audit of CIA record-keeping practices by the National Archives concluded that not every office in the agency has done this consistently in the past.

The agency intends to solve this problem by automatically capturing most of the metadata. New information systems or upgrades to legacy systems will include this capability, although to date only four systems do.

Having the metadata repository will let the CIA balance analysts' need for information with traditional security concerns. "Before, we could never be sure how to let someone know we had something that would be of use to them without divulging too much," says Olsen. Using the metadata repository, an analyst can get a list of resources. But because the search engine screens the database according to each user's security clearance or similar restrictions, the analyst would learn only about resources he is allowed to know about.

Because users get pointers to information from the repository but not necessarily access to the actual files, the people who own the information can still control whether they share it. There's no guarantee that they will, acknowledges agency CIO John Young. "It would be fatuous if I said we had solved the problem and that every officer in the agency was inspired to put the interests of the agency above the interests of his or her office," he says. But the demands of the job are opening minds and databases. "Intelligence problems require more cooperative work than before," he adds.