D'Alessandro says analysts "have been yearning for some standards to allow them to accept and pass along" files because they don't have the budgets to build interfaces system by system as they did in earlier, better funded times. The CIA doesn't disclose its budget, but according to one recent estimate, the total money the United States spends on intelligence has just kept pace with inflation.

Many companies also catalog important records—legal documents, product designs, customer files and research notes—and could base their own knowledge management systems on these catalogs. But D'Alessandro says technologists often don't ask librarians and records managers, who are information management experts, to take the lead in designing new databases and interfaces. Her previous job was as the CIA's deputy CIO, so she knows firsthand that "information management is always overlooked by the IT side."

"I think we were invited as a courtesy," she says. "We have interjected ourselves and have tried to tie ourselves to the [technology] side" of the project. "We got in through the backdoor."

Agency officials agree that broader access to information by CIA officers might also help to prevent intelligence blunders. Jim Reid, chairman of the CIA's knowledge management steering committee, notes that getting "the right information to the right person at the right time" is a mantra in the agency. Neither Reid nor other officials interviewed for this article would provide specific examples of how knowledge sharing might have helped in past cases. But Reid did say part of the point of knowledge management is to prevent fiascoes like the Chinese embassy bombing in the future.

For instance, says Reid, the metadata repository will point end users to a set of official maps. "If the map in there is wrong, you're going to see the wrong data," he says. "But it will solve the problem of someone having a map you don't know exists."