It was a bad Christmas morning this year, but it could have been far worse.

An alleged Nigerian-born terrorist on a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit would have blown up the airliner if it had not been for a fast-thinking passenger who thwarted the attack. But the incident on Northwest Flight 253 is ominous for federal IT executives and the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

Everyone agrees that the system failed. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab waltzed onto the plane in Amsterdam with hardly a ripple, not only because of screening failures, but because of failures of the intelligence community to share information and connect the warning signs sitting in a variety of government databases.

The system just did not stand up. There was a disturbing breakdown in communication among the State Department, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and the British government that allowed Abdulmutallab to buy his airplane ticket for $2,800 in cash and begin his journey that almost ended in a nightmare.

It is no easy task maintaining the databases that contain the names of both real and suspected terrorists. Huge lists of names of potential suspects must be assembled, and data must be analyzed and distributed to visa offices, border checkpoints, cargo facilities, the airlines and relevant government agencies in real time. Foreign names must be correctly spelled, agents must be trained and the database systems must be maintained.

In this case, Abdulmutallab was placed on a list with about 550,000 other names known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, or TIDE. This list is maintained by the NCTC, and was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Intelligence officials said they did not have enough information to place the Nigerian in the 400,000-person terror watch list, or on the no-fly list of fewer than 4,000 people who should be blocked from air travel; so there was information in the system, but not in the right places.

It's clear now that U.S. intelligence agencies have plenty of work to do to make sure this kind of threatening situation does not happen again. Part of the answer will be new airport screening tools, but another piece of it will be finding ways to ensure the right information is placed in the right databases, and that someone is paying close attention at all times. This is not an easy task, but there is little choice in the matter. We must get it right. - Judi