After more than 30 years toil at the Central Intelligence Agency, one might expect Carmen Medina, the recently-retired associate deputy director for intelligence, to have a fairly conservative view on operational structure at government agencies. But at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C., Medina explained how Web 2.0 strategies should be incorporated into high-reliability, high-risk organizations, such as the CIA, in order to help fulfill agencies' missions.

"The idea--and I am just livid about this--that any terrorism analyst would have an idea sequestered in their Word drive just frankly is a complete absurdity to me. And the nation should not put up with it," said Medina.

Although thorough analysis of terrorist threats has become more important, the analysis process has not adapted from how the agency analyzed threatening activity from other nations, many years ago, Medina said.

"A better solution, I propose, and one in which there would be no harm in running in parallel [to current practices]. We need to grow a new analytic effort, designed from scratch, around a large transparent and collaborative network. This effort would be specifically designed to detect possible terrorist threats and to warn of attacks," said Medina.

A new, Web 2.0-based and inspired system of analysis would:

• Examine every piece of data to some established level of thoroughness;
• Establish adequate diversity among examiners;
• Provide multiple opinions (aka. redundancy);
• Would be scalable and adjust if a situation emerges which produces more information;
• Would be quick and agile;
• Ensure transparency and allow access to appropriate parties; and
• Could be deployed in a timely manner.

Medina said assigning analysts by using a traditional account structure, as the agency currently does, doesn't achieve any of those goals. "Our present operational models are built on the failing assumption that individual control nodes can understand the complexity of a large system," said Medina.

Not only should the "Work 2.0" model be designed to perform work collaboratively, transparently and in real time, said Medina, it should be executed in web applications that could be connected to an infinite number of other nodes--inter-agency and cross-agency where applicable.

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