"The CIA has never been able to get their ops guys to talk to the analytic guys, because the ops guys basically know that if the data and names get out, people die," Orr says. "They guard their information very closely, and the analytic guys want to make everything public in the community. That tension is there across the board."

All Tarasiuk will say about the tension is that "technology is not the barrier for making them work more effectively."

"Technology can only get you so far"

A CIA clandestine officer who works closely with Tarasiuk describes the CIO role as one that has to satisfy typical CIO obligations (delivering appropriate applications to users to make them more efficient) with one big catch. "Here's the rub: He can bring all the efficiencies here, but [it's difficult] because of our unique security requirements," says the senior national clandestine service officer, who declined to be identified, citing his active duty status at the agency. "I care about: 1. Security. 2. Functionality. 3. Efficiency."

The senior officer describes the "very personal, very human" nature of the clandestine organization, which illustrates some of the IT disconnects that were inherent in the CIA's history. People, personal relationships took precedence over business processes and technology. "Twenty years ago, if you didn't want to use technology, you didn't [have to]," he says. Now, "it's nearly everything we do."

He says the CIA officers like him realize that technology applications have the ability to free up ops people to do more of the personal work—but only to a certain level. "Technology can only get you so far," he says. "Information sharing is critical, but at the same time, we need to have some 'cylinders of excellence.'"

And that's where the CIO is, always in the middle of the risk-reward quandary. "So there you have Al Tarasiuk, the CIO, trying to figure out, 'All right, what do I balance here?'" Tarasiuk says. "It's not a one-size-fits all, and it's not one solution."

Lena Trudeau, a program director at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), an independent Washington, D.C., government advisory group, notes that the government organizations typically "create a culture that would rather avoid the risk and not fail, than try and fail and learn from the failure and succeed the next time around," she says. Trudeau leads a group that is studying how collaborative technologies can help solve the U.S. government's complex problems. She says: "The CIA is a really good example of an organization where there's not a lot of tolerance for failure, but we have to be in the position where we're willing to try new things and risk failure that we can learn from and help us get it right later."

While Tarasiuk has been working to get the CIA to experiment with new IT-related data-sharing processes and applications, he worries about missing something when the consequences of failure are great. There are critical decisions that need to be made with all the data accumulated during the last 60 years, Tarasiuk says, like what to keep, what to make public and what to discard. There are also thousands of databases across the intelligence community whose contents may or may not need to be connected.

Which all weighs heavily on Tarasiuk. "The thing that worries me the most," he says, "is that we have buried somewhere, in some database, some piece of information that a person that might need access to doesn't have the access or the data is not available to them somehow."

See Part 1 (8/4/08): A business-IT alignment project like few others

See Part 2 (8/5/08): How IT moved to center stage at the CIA in the wake of 9/11

See Part 4 (8/7/08): The CIA's efforts to use new applications and Web 2.0 technologies

Also see (8/6/08): "What It's Like to Work Overseas for the CIA's IT Group"