One of the legacies of early information technology adoption in the corporate world and public sector, alike, is the tendency to view IT shops as part of the administrative cadre — placing it more in line with human resources and billing-and-receiving than an operational department. The reality, according to Sean Roche, associate deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA, is CIO and IT shops need to be part of the mission.
“Stop treating IT like a service; stop treating IT with the word ‘customer’ in it; stop having IT people feel like they are somehow in the admin portion of our organizations,” Roche told attendees at the 2016 DoD Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) conference in Atlanta, Georgia. “IT is the mission.”
Formerly, IT was part of the directorate of administration at the CIA, Roche pointed out.
“One of the biggest changes we have to make — and one of the changes we are making — looking at IT as mission and seeing it as a critical mission component changes the way we go about funding, changes the way we go about prioritizing programs,” Roche said. “As we evolved we realized IT is inextricably tied to our ability to respond.”
Not only that, but the CIA is discovering that the swaths of information people are freely putting out into the ether daily is becoming more valuable than more traditional intelligence gathering techniques.
“Open source data — I’m talking about streaming analytics, social media — is as valuable and more valuable everyday as the information we get clandestinely,” Roche said. “The old story is that open source [intelligence] was always doing good things. But unless a paper was marked ‘top secret,’ it didn’t seem to have the same weight. We know that not to be true today.”
When agencies view their IT employees as more than troubleshooters for broken printers, they can bring them in as solution providers to help the organization meet its mission.
Source: C4ISRNET