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Knowledge Management Tools 291

Box 8.4
An example: Intellipedia at the CIA

Web 2.0 technologies are enabling the CIA to share more information within their agency
in addition to their intelligence counterparts ( Wailgum 2008 ). The events of September
11, 2001, have catalyzed a series of reforms in the intelligence community, especially when
it became clear that key agencies were not able to connect the dots.
After 9/11, we asked ourselves: why was no one able to connect the dots? (David Ignatius, Associate
Editor, The Washington Post). Could 9/11 have been prevented? In a number of crucial cases, mis-
handled intelligence, bureaucratic tangles and legal hurdles blinded the CIA and the FBI to clues right
in front of them. Individually, none of these was a smoking gun. But combined they were a four-alarm
fi re. ( Frank 2004 )
The CIA is well aware of the post-9/11 analyses and reports that described how sixteen
government intelligence agencies were unable to puncture internal and external silos and
as a result critical information was not shared and was not aggregated to detect a pattern —
and a substantial threat. The CIA ’ s CIO Al Tarasiuk, introduced the notion of web 2.0 and
KM 2.0 into the sixty-one-year-old agency in the form of Intellipedia, modeled on Wiki-
pedia. Intellipedia is a bottom-up system that allows all US analysts to share their informa-
tion, their analyses, and even their insights with trusted peers over a secure network. The
new system is essentially a wiki for knowledge sharing that was implemented in 2006.
There is no anonymity as users log on and are authenticated each time they use Intelli-
pedia. There is a form of expertise locator system integrated within this system as users
can fi nd out who has expertise on a particular topic, a particular country, and so forth.
After two years in operation, Intellipedia has over forty thousand registered users who
have made almost two million edits on the web pages (which number around three
hundred thousand). It is interesting to note that the most prolifi c user of Intellipedia is
an employee who is preparing to retire, which indicates that such systems may also play
a role in organizational memory and knowledge continuity (see chapter 11).
In the old web 1.0 world, the content contained within Intellipedia would have been
shared with a limited amount of people and most likely through e-mail (which only served
to add to employee information overload). Intellipedia defi nes and enables the US intel-
ligence community and is a clear contrast to what prevailed before: a need to know basis
for knowledge sharing and one based on status, hierarchical relationships, and formal
authority. The major goal of Intellipedia is to enable collaboration across silos to help
participants solve complex problems and to connect all of the known dots. This requires
that participants speak the same language (i.e., share the same vocabulary and defi ne all
the dots in the same way). This new way of working also requires the motivation to share,
which in turn entails a change in organizational culture (see chapter 7). The major chal-
lenge is not with the technology but with a change in mind-set of the individuals and the
collective mind-set that prevails as the organizational culture.