Sean Dennehy & Chris Rasmussen

From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community 

Thursday, October 30, 2008
Building 3 Auditorium
3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

The speakers will brief the technical and cultural changes underway in the Intelligence Community involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking tools. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published "The Wiki and The Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community." Three years later, a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the Intelligence Community aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information. These tools are being used to improve information sharing across the US Intelligence Community by moving information out of traditional channels. This enables people to leverage one another's knowledge, connect on related issues, and facilitates greater collective awareness.

Sean Dennehy has more than 15 years of experience in various elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, DIA's Joint Staff Intelligence, and supporting US Air Force operations. As the pilot customer for Intellipedia, he has become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0 solutions into the Intelligence Community's business practices. He has developed an innovative "sabbatical" program that introduces Intelligence Community officers to the numerous web 2.0 applications that are being deployed on multiple intelligence networks. The focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption where officers replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects encountered when individuals move projects out of "channels"and onto "platforms". His actions are based on the National Intelligence Strategy's six main characteristics: results-focused, collaborative, bold, future-oriented, self-evaluating, and innovative. Together with a small cadre of early adopters, Mr. Dennehy is helping to break down stovepipes to allow intelligence professionals to truly act as a "community".

Mr. Chris Rasmussen is a social software knowledge manager and trainer within the US Intelligence Community (IC). Mr. Rasmussen evangelizes and teaches how to use lightweight and inexpensive social tools such as Intellipedia (wiki), blogs, tag|connect (social bookmarking service), widgets, mashups, social networking services, etc. for knowledge management over the IC Enterprise These tools, in agency-neutral space, have considerable advantages over exceedingly complex databases and applications often with opaque data access layers isolated within agency footprints with too many controls. He was selected as one of the "Federal 100" by Federal Computer Week in 2008. This award is giving to top executives from government, industry and academia that had the greatest impact on the government information systems community.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Paul Hunter