(soon)
1/24/2004 10:07 AM
The Friends of the Intelligence Community group's conference at NIST, this week, lead me to struggle deeply about why well-known and fundamental problems with technology and methodology are persistent and resilient to solution.
The AS-IS and TO-BE diagrams at:
http://www.bcngroup.org/procurementModel/as-is.htm
seem to be correct in every detail, and common agreement was expressed at the Friends of the IC workshop regarding this correctness.
The problems are odd and telling, when viewed objectively and holistically.
1) There is sufficient funding, but funds are spent each year on IT systems that are poorly designed, poorly transitioned and rejected (84% of the time) by the analysts. A list of the systems that are "shelve ware" might be published on a web site.
2) There is an absence of institutional mechanisms to support cross-agency awareness of similar efforts
3) The science underlying the design, coding and transitioning of IT systems is weak, incorrect and/or poorly understood.
4) There is a failure to understand that the problems with IT systems are not specific to isolated working groups, and there is a failure to share lessons learned.
Everyone in our group commonly feels these problems. But ultimately any solution has to be framed while avoiding the elephant in the room. This elephant is that paradigmatic fixation on engineering and computer science principles are reinforced by funding and procurement decisions. But the approach of cognitive engineering, narrowly defined, is rejected by the user communities as being un-usable. The reason why this problem is persistent and resilient to solution has to do with the system economic benefits derived from the non-solution of the problem.
We do not have a problem with individual behavior; the problem is in how the procurement system is designed! Individual behavior follows the reinforcement made available through the funding mechanisms.
http://www.bcngroup.org/procurementModel/structuredCriticism.htm
***
Sometimes an intense experience of a problem leads to a sudden realization of something that is obvious, has been around in plain sight, and yet has been ignored.
It is education that is needed. The IC and the medical community need a single payer system that supports scholarship and educational processes, as well as cognitive aids and data manipulation tools.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/knowledgeSharingFoundation.htm