Q&A: Dale Meyerrose

IT COLLABORATOR:
Creating Synergy Between DoD and the Intelligence Community



Interview with
Dale Meyerrose
Chief Information Officer
Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Dale W. Meyerrose became the first associate director of national intelligence and chief information officer on December 21, 2005, where he serves as the intelligence community chief information officer and information sharing executive.

Meyerrose manages activities relating to the information technology infrastructure and enterprise requirements of the intelligence community. He has procurement approval authority over all information technology items related to the enterprise architectures of all IC components. Meyerrose directs and manages all information technology-related procurement for the IC and ensures that all expenditures for information technology and research and development activities are consistent with the community’s enterprise architecture. He also leads information sharing strategy and policy for the IC.

Meyerrose served for 30 years in the Air Force, retiring as a major general. His career highlights include service as a director and chief information officer in three Air Force major air commands and three unified combatant commands, a deployed joint task force director of communications in Southwest Asia, and a commander of two major Air Force communications units.

Meyerrose graduated from the Air Force Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics in 1975. He received a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Utah in 1978.

Meyerrose was interviewed by MIT Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: Your office has been especially active in working collaboratively with the office of DoD CIO John Grimes. Can you give us an overview of these joint initiatives?

A: First of all, as I came into the job, I quickly realized how inextricably linked DoD and the intelligence community are. In fact, a majority of people in intelligence are also in DoD. It became apparent to me that we needed to quickly establish the right working relationship with my counterpart, and the commands within DoD. John Grimes is a long-time friend. He came on board at the Pentagon about the same time that I did here. We met shortly after we both took office, and we pledged that we would be joined at the hip in everything that we did, because we saw it as mutually supportive and absolutely essential for making progress and moving forward in many areas—information technology, information sharing, security and accreditation and a whole host of other things.

Mr. Grimes and I set out to do just that. He took the lead in several things and I pledged support, and likewise I took the lead in some other things. In total, since he and I have come into office, we have created 34 joint initiatives between DoD and the intelligence community, just in our work area. This is not all-inclusive, nor does it encompass everything DoD and the intelligence community are doing together, but just was what the CIO of DoD and the CIO of the intelligence community put together. We have systematically worked through those 34 joint initiatives. We’ve also signed five major agreements, published a joint instruction, founded a joint program office, and have series of joint strategies for continuing to work things between DoD and the intelligence community.

Q: What are the two offices doing to address the need for secure information sharing between the military and intelligence communities?

A: Let me give you three specific examples. First, we stood up a joint program office, the Unified Cross-Domain Management Office, which is charged with to come up with cross-domain solutions for use throughout DoD and the intelligence community. We jointly man and fund it, and we rotate the directors of that office every other time between the defense and intelligence communities. For the past year and a half, the intelligence community has had the directorship, and now in another month or so DoD will have the next directorship. That office is specifically charged with working cross-domain security, information sharing technical solutions.

The second example is that we are jointly working a transformation of certification and accreditation policy of DoD and the IC. This is a series of policies that, at least on the intelligence side, took three years to write, four years to coordinate, and we’ve not tested them in eight years. That’s double-digit years since we changed those sets of policies and guidelines. How relevant are policies and guidelines done 10 or 11 years ago to today’s technology? They’re obviously not, and it’s been an Achilles heel of ours, and has introduced lots of inefficiencies. So John and I pledged to redo our certification and accreditation initiative, which is basically how we manage risk in our enterprise. Along the way, we have co-opted several collaborators, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Office of Management and Budget, the program manager for information-sharing environment and others, who also saw a similar need to develop common terms of reference, standard procedures, understood criteria, and positions of reciprocity in order to better manage this particular area.

The third area that is an example of how we work for secure information sharing is, since last summer, the business of search and discovery on SIPRNet, the secret network that is run by DoD and services all of DoD and other parts of the federal government. All of the search and discovery capability is done by the intelligence community. So we provide the platforms that carry out those functions on DoD’s network. As a corollary, they are providing several of the standards in the Net-Centric Enterprise Service solution that we will use in the intelligence community. So you can see that we’ve worked very hard at being mutually supportive, capitalizing on areas where we had relative advantage and centers of excellence, and creating synergy between DoD and the intelligence community.

Q: What changes do you think are needed in the way the intelligence community acquires information technology?

A: There are a couple of things that we need to change our paradigms in terms of acquiring information technology. First of all, many of our acquisition processes are set up for multi-year platforms such as ships, tanks and airplanes. Multi-year procurements like that within the IT business may undergo several generations of change. So a multi-year acquisition process, as we think of traditional acquisition processes, doesn’t serve IT processes very well. We need to think about information technology as having a much quicker agility cycle, in terms of how fast we bring things on and how fast we replace them.

The second thing that is peculiar to the intelligence community is that we’re not a department or a single Cabinet office. We draw forces from 15 different Cabinet organizations across the executive branch. In the past, in terms of acquisition or procurement, each agency has solved requirements and mission needs individually, agency by agency. The function of the DNI is to replace the agency-centric problem-solving mechanisms with more community problem-solving mechanisms. Those are the two fundamental ways in which we need to adjust how we bring new information technology on.

Q: Is the A-Space collaborative information sharing environment for the IC up and running? What are some of your other initiatives in using the latest in Web technology?

A: There is a whole host of what most people would recognize as Web 2.0 technologies that we’re in the process of making use of across the community. A-Space is one of the captures that tells that. The story behind it is interesting, in how we’ve evolved in our thinking. A couple of years ago, we first started talking about how to allow analysts, no matter where they are in the community, to collaboratively work and solve problems—to make information technology transparent, have people not fight the technology, and make things more intuitive. The first idea that came up was that we needed an A-LAN [analyst local area network]. If you think about it, we all have paradigms that we associate with a local area network. So we started thinking about the problem that way.

Then we said a local area network is the wrong paradigm. Let’s think in terms of an A-network. If you think about it, all the paradigms that you think about solving the problem would change. The problem is still the same one that we set out to solve with the A-LAN idea, but the A-network caused us to think about it, and realize that we were still shooting behind the rabbit. With the name changed to A-Space, that brought our mindset around to saying that we need to solve this with Web 2.0 technology. The challenge didn’t change the whole time, from when we thought about it as an A-LAN, an A-Net or an A-Space, but how we thought about solving it did, and A-Space was where we settled.

You can look at virtually anything else that you see in the commercial sector, and know that we are figuring out how to make those relevant to us. If you think about it, all the Web 2.0 technologies are about socialization and people interacting. That’s what we’re trying to enhance—people interacting for the purposes of intelligence. We have to be careful about coining corporate logos and such, so you’ll hear about Intellipedia, which works much like its namesake in the commercial world, except that we added attribution and things associated with handling classified information. You’ll find what we call I-Video, which is a vault of video clips and multi-media material in the work space, as enabling technologies in order to get the job done better and more thoroughly. Again, I don’t want to coin phrases based on commercial products, but if you think about technologies out there that produce things like personal spaces and “face” kinds of things, you can find a corresponding effort that we’re doing in the intelligence community, both at the highly classified level as well as the unclassified.

Q: What initiatives do you have underway to improve information sharing about terrorist threats?

A: There are lots of things. The responsibilities associated with information sharing and terrorism falls to another office within the ODNI. Ambassador Ted McNamara is the program manager for information sharing environment, which he works on an interagency basis. We support him in providing the intelligence portion support for his interagency work, which includes a national information-sharing strategy and guidelines from the president’s executive office. We support Ambassador McNamara and his team in several ways of improving the sharing of information about terrorism.

Q: What organizational changes have you carried out in terms of IT management and structure, and why were they done?

A: When I first came on board, we inherited a legacy organization from the director of central intelligence under the old intelligence construct. Basically, that was the second hat of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it was a hat that had about one set of tools and capabilities, which was to call meetings and try to get consensus. So all the problem-solving mechanisms that were in place when I came centered around committee meetings and people taking votes. In fact, there were more than 100 committees set up across the community in order to solve problems. Most of them were well intentioned and had a lot of smart people working on them, but they were finite, narrowly focused and working under the supposition that they could only put out guidance, not direction.

The first thing we did was disband all of those committees and set up a governance structure around the authorities of the director of national intelligence as laid out in the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. Our governance structure is formulated around those responsibilities, and the responsibilities that I have that are specifically legislated in the 2005 authorization act. We made those organizational changes.

The last large organizational change we put out also had to do with the idea of collectively solving issues, versus agency-centric collaboration and solutions. As a part of the director’s 500-day action plan, and a part his FY09 budget and program, we created the Single Information Environment Office. That is an office that is specifically charged to work areas that are common across all 16 agencies to come up with a unified solution that each agency works toward supporting.

Q: What do you see as the most important achievements of your office during your tenure?

A: First of all, we’ve been able to lay a foundation. When you’re starting a new organization, there are a lot of things that are different, and that you have to work on what mature organizations figured out a long time ago, but organizations that are new have to start from the ground up. We laid a lot of foundations, such as the one I mentioned earlier about changing the committee structure. Additionally, we’re a new office in government, the executive branch and the intelligence community, so the business of establishing relationships and our roles in missions, both within the community and within the government, was very important. As you can imagine, that was a lengthy process, but we’ve matured out of the new organization syndrome into one that is mature in most of its processes.

Secondly, we’ve managed to accomplish several of what people call “low-hanging fruit” accomplishments. Whether opening networks to broader information sharing, changing how we do classification of documents, some of the early policies such as writing to release and providing tear-lines and those kinds of things, I think are all accomplishments. But there is one thing that some people may not see as an accomplishment, but I think may be in fact our major accomplishment, beyond getting organized and making a place for ourselves in the scheme of things. That is that we have changed the nature of conversations over the course of the past two years. Two years ago, the idea of making all intelligence discoverable was probably considered as heresy by some. The idea that said we would open up certain accesses to other partners and stakeholders was seen as undoable by some. That was the environment that we found ourselves getting started in.

Two years later, the nature of those conversations has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer considered to be heresy to say that we’re going to make virtually all intelligence discoverable. It is no longer seen as undoable that certain types of sharing be permitted. So we have been able to put in place plans and budgets that carry forth this new line of thinking and accomplishment across the intelligence community, both among ourselves and with our partners across the government.

Q: What are your primary goals for 2008?

A: Many of those are laid out in the director’s 500-day plan, and it is going to be next level on collaboration and creating the sense of a responsibility to provide. The idea is creating decision advantage as a goal for what all intelligence needs to do. Specifically, we are looking to mature things associated with cyber-security initiatives, and with the Single Information Environment referred to earlier, which is the joint problem-solving function that all the agencies participate in. We’re also looking to firm up and complete the rest of the 34 initiatives that we have between us and DoD.

Q: What is the mission of your office under the reorganized intelligence community system?

A: My legislated authorities are very similar to what you would find for chief information officers in general. But my specific legislated authorities center around providing enterprise architecture standards, around procurement and acquisition policy, and also around the element of how the intelligence community enterprise operates. My last responsibility as CIO is helping science and technology come up with the right information technology to incorporate in intelligence, both for tradecraft and workcraft intelligence in the future. Beyond that, the operative word in the CIO title is the middle one, information. I am also the information-sharing executive for the intelligence community. In that regard, I work specifically how well we share information, how well we collaborate, and how easy, effective and efficient that is across the intelligence community.

Q: What do you see as the most pressing IT challenges facing the intelligence community?

A: In truth, every problem is a people problem, rather than a technology problem. I’ve got more than three decades working in the IT business, and in every case I’ve found out that our systems do precisely what we design them to do. When one complains about a system not doing this or that, we often view that as a technology issue, when in fact in most instances that was a policy decision that said for budget, policy, planning or timing reasons, these were the limits that we were going to put on various programs. But if you were to look at technology things that I think we need to exploit the most, they are those things associated with data and virtualization of data, storing data and moving data across domains and levels of classification. That is a definite focus of ours.

Q: You had a distinguished career in military IT before coming to the ODNI. How has your experience in the uniformed service affected how you go about your current responsibilities?

A: There are a couple of things that come to mind. The first is that, as I said earlier, I’ve got over three decades in this business, and I worked consistently with the intelligence community throughout my military career. So the issues that face the intelligence community were not a surprise to me. In addition, working with the U.S. government, Congress and other parts of the executive branch were not new experiences for me, so I was able to leverage much of that. Interestingly, however, my last job in uniform was at U.S. Northern Command, where I was the first general officer assigned to the command in its standup. Many of the lessons that I learned in that experience were directly applicable in helping stand up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I feel doubly blessed and prepared in many ways as a result of my military experience and how I’ve been able to use it in the intelligence community.

Q: What are your closing thoughts?

A: My closing thoughts are that, by its very nature, the intelligence community does not get a lot of visibility to the American public. But I can assure you that there are literally thousands of professionals who have dedicated the majority of their adult lives to service to their country. We work every day, and I am proud and pleased not only to work with them but also to represent them in many forums, and try to showcase the good work they are doing in trying to fulfill the expectations of both the American people and ourselves in providing the best intelligence structure, architecture, solutions and problem solving, and the best intelligence products we can. ♦