User:MLWilson/Sandbox

Bonini Article Key Points

 * Business must be involved in sociopolitical issues because have so much to add and have strategic interest in doing so.
 * Wider role and impact value creation
 * Currently deficient -- due to short-term $-pressures, ignorance, view as outside/public affairs/legal department issues.
 * Need to integrate sociopolitcal issue awareness into strategic decision-making processes -- risks and opportunities -- risk management.
 * Today's difference -- pressure and complexity of sociopolitical issues; speed of change; ability of activists to mobilize public opinion, i.e. stakeholders. - corporate response same - not proactive (flat footed)
 * Broader stakeholders - formal and informal pressures.
 * Informal to formal and/or informal is often, now, enough pressure.
 * Increasingly, long-term value (e.g., brand, talent, relationships) affected by sociopolitical megatrends and growing power of stakeholders.
 * Rising tide of expectations -- business must aniticipate, understand, and embed in their business strategy
 * -people better understand connectedness - hold formerly viewed indirect stakeholders accountable - bottom-up.
 * MBA textbooks generally don't discuss.
 * strategic approach 3-fold: forces can alter landscape; socio issues potentially damaging short-term financially-long-term reputationally; product/market strategies can emerge from sociopolitcal forces.
 * Companies can: detection/anticipation; options; engage/influence debate;
 * Strategic bets: not only reduce risk but capitalize on sociopolitcal shifts.
 * Unpredictability means portfolio of options.
 * Know when to collaborate/cooperate -- takes time.
 * Company-wide, coordinated approach.
 * Business must proactively understand and engage - those that do will benefit most - be able to shape and create value.
 * Currently, business only look at as risk instead of opportunity and are ineffectively at managing.

USCENTCOM Web 2.0 Production Proposal
INTRODUCTION

The USCENTCOM Web 2.0 Production Proposal defines some key ways the Command’s Intelligence Directorate can take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and business practices. These tools can both complement and supplant current Web 1.0 production methods and dramatically improve intelligence capability and mission effectiveness.

Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web-based services and communities—such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and networking sites—which facilitate collaboration, information sharing, and learning between users at the network level (Wikipedia, 2007). Similar to email, Web 2.0 has changed the nature of knowledge management among enterprises, both public and private.

Harnessing Web 2.0 directly supports Intelligence Community (IC) information sharing efforts called for by the Congress (9/11 Commission Report, 2004; Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, 2004), President (WMD Commission Report, 2005; Executive Order 13388, 2005), and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) (National Intelligence Strategy, 2005; Intelligence Community Directive 200, 2006; and 100 Day Plan for Integration and Collaboration, 2007). It is not a matter of if, but when such tools are adopted. Already, we see Web 2.0 being embraced and spreading rapidly among the IC.

OVERVIEW

Intellipedia

Intellipedia is the Intelligence Community’s (IC) wiki which is located on the three main networks: JWICS (Top Secret//SI/TK//NF); SIPRNET (Secret//NF); and NIPRNET/Intelink-U (Unclassified//FOUO). The primary purpose of Intellipedia is for the community as a whole to collectively create interagency, issue-based articles. Intellipedia articles by their nature are not “finished” intelligence products; rather, they enable and represent what we as a community collectively know from a dynamically integrated and interlinked knowledge base that can be continually updated overtime.

Intelink Blogs

Blogs were first incorporated into the national security community by General James Cartwright during Cartwright’s previous tenure as Commander, United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) using software called SKI-Web. Since this time, blog use has continued to proliferate exponentially among society, enterprises, and most recently the IC using Intelink blogs and other agency-centric services. Similar to the rest of society, blogs enable the community to rapidly share information, provide feedback, interlink information, and discover knowledge as a community in an open, dynamic, and free-flowing manner—free from the channeled communication constraints imposed by email.

Tag Connect (social bookmarking)

Tag Connect is an Intelink-based bookmark tool based loosely on the social bookmarking service called del.icio.us on the public internet. It combines traditional bookmarking with a community, so that users can see and search each other's bookmarks, comment on them, and organize them by flat, non-hierarchical categories called “tags” (which are personal taxonomies called folksonomies). At first, this system appears to be just another way of bookmarking pages. However, upon further use, users will begin to see the value of sharing their bookmarks and exploring others’. For example, they will find users whose tastes are similar to their own, and thereby find web pages of interest that they otherwise would not have found—users with similar interest are acting as your search engine. Social bookmarking also cuts down on email because it reduces the number of “hey, did you see this link” emails (Intellipedia-U, 2007).

RSS (really simple syndication)

An RSS document, called a “feed,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text and is used to publish and view frequently updated content such as blogs. Rather than having to manually check multiple web sites, RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite sites by having their content automatically fed into a “feed reader” or “aggregator.” The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader automatically checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates (Wikipedia, 2007).

Gallery

Gallery is a web-based photo storage and sharing service provided by Intelink. Users may upload, tag, group, and share images with the community. Similar to Tag Connect, users benefit at the individual and collective levels from the ability to access and interlink each other’s images.

Intelink Forums

Intelink Forums enable collaboration and threaded discussion to occur around topical issues of interest to the community. While similar to blogs, forums are meant to collaborate on particular issues and are not “owned” by an individual or team in the same sense as a blog.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Intellipedia

1. Rather than remain wed to storing information in personal folders and drives (or in one’s brain), which is not available to the rest of the community, analysts at the USCENTCOM Joint Intelligence Center (JICCENT) should supplant this practice by integrating and interlinking a majority of this knowledge into Intellipedia instead. Doing so has several obvious benefits: (1); (2); and (3).

2. When jointly drafting a more in-depth, issue-based article with the community or a large set of stakeholders, rather than resort to bounding around multiple Microsoft Word documents via email, analysts’ should consider drafting such articles in Intellipedia instead. Doing so has several benefits: (1) wikis were made to overcome the difficulty of email collaboration and are far more speedy and transparent (2)

3. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, the real power will come from the ability to collaborate, self-synchronize and integrate intelligence, plans, and operations across the interagency using Intellipedia combined with other capabilities. For example, operators, planners, and analysts can collaborate on the discussion pages of issue-based articles in Intellipedia and rapidly tag and interlink associated information to pages, such as adaptive CONPLANS in Intellipedia. Trans-regional issues should be able to be tracked and synchronized across organizational, cultural, temporal, and geographic boundaries (including COCOMS) more effectively as a result of the tool’s issue- versus organizational-focused nature. Such processes for more formal purposes are still being evolved by some of the best minds in the community.

Intelink blogs

1. Analysts should take advantage of having a “voice” in the form of individual blogs to disseminate and discuss ideas or information relevant to their interests. Doing so enables analysts to connect with other users and receive feedback in the form of comments and trackback links. The number of links and comments a post has lets the analyst know the perceived value of their blog to the community. By enabling access to other analysts’ minds, including their opinions and mistakes through open interaction and feedback loops, blogs improve organizational learning while mitigating the information burden often associated with email

2. While Web 2.0 tools generally serve a more informal or “unfinished intelligence” purpose, and one which is more open rather than private, they can be used for more formal purposes as well. We propose short intelligence reports, such as Summary Intelligence Reports and much of the daily intelligence update functions be moved from Microsoft Word and PowerPoint products to blog posts using team blogs provided by Intelink. Unlike individual blogs, team blogs belong to a group of people and are used to disseminate information by and from the team. Doing so would have several benefits: (1) blogs can be rapidly disseminated; contain direct links to references or other sources of information; be updated; have feedback in the form of comments and trackbacks from other blogs; have permanent hyperlinks; can be categorized and tagged; can be fed to users via RSS feeds; new posts or comments can send emails to subscribers; and more valuable blogs are more discoverable from greater numbers of links.