The
End of the Beginning
Government
must institutionalize Information Sharing as it evolves from the
“need to know” to the “need to
share” to now the “responsibility to
provide”.
Information sharing is all about delivering the right information in
the right format to the right person at the right time.
Having trusted information allows us to make the correct decisions
especially during any type of emergency. But where can you find it? Who
is gathering it? How is it being disseminated to those who need it?
Immense
Task
One person who is tackling this immense task is Dr. Steven Phillips of
the National Library of Medicine (NLM). His job has been to establish a
Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIRMC) at NLM.
The purpose is to have a single government agency that specializes in
providing disaster information. NLM has made a strong commitment to
disaster remediation and demonstrating how libraries and librarians can
be
part of continuous access to health information when disasters occur.
“I
come back to culture. We need to institutionalize a culture of
information sharing among all echelons of government. This new culture
of IS while it is growing, is not a pervasive culture in the U.S.
government.”
Ambassador
Thomas McNamara, National Program Manager for
Information
Sharing (IS)
The centerpiece of Dr. Phillips’ information sharing efforts
is the DIRMC website – http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/dimrc.html
– which is the new
government portal dedicated to provide personnel, tools, information
and
research to assist with disaster preparedness and response.
“We are trying to make it user friendly at every level, not
only the type of information, but the accessibility of the
information,” explained Dr. Phillips. “We are not
creating information; we are just finding credible information. Then we
will massage it a way that when appropriate it can be loaded down to
PDAs in short summaries of that information.”
Not
That Easy
The DIRMC is an example of information sharing (IS) in action where
trusted information is gathered, vetted and distributed through
channels to those on the front lines using modern technology to make
real-time decisions.
But not all IS is or has been that easy. To its credit, the government
has heard the public’s demand for increased transparency; its
insistence on information sharing between federal, state and local
governments and the private
sector; all while respecting the public’s privacy concerns
and meeting the rigorous security requirements of the post 9/11 world.
For information sharing to succeed throughout government, there have to
be rules of the road. Those rules are set out in the National Strategy for
Information Sharing published in October 2007.
The
National Strategy for Information Sharing
According to the National
Strategy for Information Sharing effective
information sharing comes through strong partnerships among federal,
state, local and tribal authorities, private sector organizations and
our
foreign partners and allies; it enables information-driven and
risk-based
detection, prevention, deterrence, response, protection, and emergency
management efforts.
Further, it provides “the vision for how our Nation will best
use and build upon the information sharing innovations which have
emerged post-September 11 in order to develop a fully coordinated and
integrated information sharing
capability that supports our efforts to combat terrorism”.
Ambassador Ted McNamara is the national Program Manager for Information
Sharing (IS). His job is to help implement the strategy.
According to McNamara, “We are at the end of the beginning,
when it comes to information sharing. But we have a long way
to go if we are going to share information as we must share it to
protect the nation.”
He calls on government to “institutionalize information
sharing as it evolves from the “need to know” to
the “need to share” to now the
“responsibility to provide”.
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Five Distinct Challenges
To
reach our goal, the nation must face up and meet five distinct
challenges said McNamara, “because there is much
more in front of us than behind.”
According to McNamara, we need to:
1.
Fix problem of reciprocity for
personnel security clearances and facilitate accreditations. This
is a significant problem in the government and even more so if we are
going to get state, locals, tribal, private sector involved.
“We have to get that problem solved,” urged
McNamara.
2.
Continue to define common processes
and data standards. These guide key IS activities such as
those associated with Watch List, information alerts and other business
processes.
“As an example, we recently
released a common governmentwide set of data standards for suspicious
activity reporting,
so at all government levels all the way down to the cop on the beat we
now have a common framework to sharing information with respect to
suspicious activities with potential terrorism nexus,” said
McNamara.
“All federal, state and local
agencies plus the private sector will adopt these common standards and
take them and apply them to “snowflakes” of
suspicious activities that no one could make a
“snowball” of out them before, because we
couldn’t put this stuff together.”
Now with this new system being tested in
pilot and already being used in urban areas of southern California and
LA, we have a method for making sure those individual suspicious
activity reports are analyzed and looked when brought to the attention
of regional and national officials said McNamara.
“Frankly, those types of
changes and standards are going to have to occur faster if we are going
to succeed.”
3.
Maintain the strongest commitment to
the high national priority of preserving, protecting and defending
information
privacy and the legal rights of Americans.
According to McNamara, we must do that
to survive. “We are beginning a long term transformation
whose evolution can finally move the government into the new
information age. We need a national effort to responsibly
guide a national IS effort that can protect our society and at the same
time protect our liberties and either would not endanger the
other.”
4.
Rationalize, standardize and simplify
the procedures for marking up and handling terrorism information,
homeland security information and law enforcement information.
McNamara said this is important particularly for that sensitive but
unclassified (SBU)
information. “We must rationalize, standardize and simplify
SBU or we are not going to be able to share outside the national
security community effectively. Those outside this environment
don’t get this type of information routinely. It
must be made more understandable to that everyone can share the
information.”
5.
Accept and manage risk. McNamara is
adamant that we have to understand how to manage it and we
can’t avoid it. Government needs to learn how to use risk
models to mitigate risk and share information when warranted and
permissible. This sharing has to occur within as trusted and secure
environment and must be protected or won’t be shared. This
is true in both public and private environments. While our information
is well protected now, but not well enough.
“We must do better. The reason
we have a new cyber initiative is because we are not sitting in a safe
and secure environment today. Our networks are being attacked daily. We
are challenged, threatened and penetrated,” explained
McNamara.
“I come back to culture. We
need to institutionalize a culture of information sharing among all
echelons of government. This new culture of IS while its growing, is
not a pervasive culture in government.”
“The need to know; the need to
share; the responsibility to provide; we need mid-level managers to buy
into this to make it work. They are like the top sergeants; they make
the services run, they make the stuff go.”
Finally, McNamara urged that we not
hinder new technology tools. “Frankly it will be a disaster
if the private sector and the society at large enter into the
information world of the 21st century and the government is condemned
to remain in the 20th century and not even in the last decades of the
20th century.”
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