Intelligence veteran aims to motivate young analysts

Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.

Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and My Space, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.

The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.

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Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job.

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America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.

In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented.

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The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently

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Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.

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Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.

Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.

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Change Without End

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Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "

Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset.

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But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying.

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