It's not surprising that there's been resistance. "A lot of things are related to turf and how much you own and control," Tarasiuk says. "What we're doing, in effect, is we're taking some of that control away. And that always hurts, and that's why it makes it difficult because you are pushing out a culture that existed for many years."

CIA CIO Al Tarasiuk

One result of the enterprise data layer strategy is Trident, a new research and analysis application for CIA analysts that links a set of a dozen or so (Tarasiuk won't be specific) logical data repositories and has tiered access (depending on a user's need to access the data) and single access control to all the databases.

Trident debuted in 2007, and it manages the voluminous amount of information flowing into the CIA and allows analysts to organize and comb through the intelligence most critical to their specialty. Trident provides a multitude of capabilities for them: tools for search, foldering, knowledge management, sharing, information extraction, link analysis, mapping and data visualization.

"Trident allows analysts to spend less time trying to find relevant information and more time analyzing," Tarasiuk notes. He says that Trident has given many of the analysts an extra hour a day to perform more analysis.

"The number of people looking over your shoulder is staggering"

Next on Tarasiuk's agenda has been to fix project management. Ken Westbrook, chief of business information strategy in the CIA's intelligence directorate (the agency's intelligence analysts), recalls that the past project management process had stifling "control gates" and placed too many cooks in the kitchen. "The problem with that is that it became so bureaucratic," Westbrook says. "We were having projects, taking dozens of control gates, each of which could have hundreds of people in a room. It was not an efficient way of getting the job done."

Ken Orr, principal researcher at The Ken Orr Institute and a former member of the National Research Council (NRC) committee who's studied government IT project failures for years (though none at the CIA), says, "When it comes to managing big projects, the feds have this terrible oversight problem, and when anything goes wrong, they add another oversight layer." "If you've got $100 million to $200 million project, the [number of] meetings and oversight and people looking over your shoulder is staggering."

Since taking over, Tarasiuk has moved the CIA's enterprise IT operations completely to an agile project methodology, and, according to internal customer data, now maintains an 80 percent success rate in delivering applications, he says. IT has streamlined the "control gate" process to more easily meet deadlines, Westbrook says, and now tracks deliverables, deadlines and whether they were met. "That's revolutionized things," Westbrook adds.