A New Fellow Joins The Center: John Pereira

John will lead Center thought leadership activity focused on the intelligence enterprise in government, providing insights and recommendations that can help leaders across intelligence agencies improve program performance, effectiveness and efficiency in this critically important mission area. John also serves as Intelligence Industry Leader for Defense & Intelligence for IBM Global Business Services, Public Services Sector. We look forward to John sharing his contributions through the Center’s blogs, reports, and events.

Chris Whitlock

Chris Whitlock has worked defense and national security issues for the past 30 years. For the last 20, he focused primarily on strategy consulting on intelligence issues from an analytic perspective. He co-founded and was the CEO of Edge Consulting, which applied empirical methods and management consulting techniques to advise on major programmatic issues confronting DoD and the Intelligence Community. He holds a B.A. in History (Mississippi), an M.A. in National Security (Georgetown) and an M.B.A. (George Mason).

Frank B. Strickland

Frank B. Strickland is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the IBM Center for The Business of Government.

Federal Government Reform Resources: The IBM Center

There are six “go to” topics in the IBM Center’s Resource Center for incoming new political appointees as well as for veteran career executives preparing for the new year ahead

Topic 1:  Helping New Leaders Succeed.  The IBM Center has updated its two most popular books for new leaders in government:

Predictive Security Intelligence: Achieving Holistic Cybersecurity

No longer can security programs rely on “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” — adversaries could already be inside systems, stealing data or probing to get in.  Too many CIOs and CISOs have thought their systems and data were secure when in fact the opposite was true.   Security programs need effective protection of valuable information and systems to prevent data breaches, and to comply with the ever increasing federal compliance requirements (such as the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the Privacy Act, policy and guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an

New Tools for Collaboration: The Experience of the U.S. Intelligence Community

The purpose of this report is to learn lessons by looking at the use of internal collaborative tools across the Intelligence Community. The initial rubric was tools, but the real focus is collaboration, for while the tools can enable, what ultimately matters are policies and practices interacting with organizational culture. It looks for good practices to emulate. The ultimate question is how and how much could, and should, collaborative tools foster integration across the Community.

Empirically Based Intelligence Management: Using Operations Research to Improve Programmatic Decision Making

On May 14, 2012, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provided a memorandum to all departments and agencies on the need to use evidence throughout the Fiscal Year 2014 budget submission. The memorandum provides four pages of issues and approaches for using evidence in the development, evaluation, and management of government programs. OMB also encourages agencies to strengthen program evaluation through a dedicated senior leader, such as a chief evaluation officer reporting directly to the secretary or deputy secretary.

Assessing the Value of Intelligence: Lessons for Leaders

Applying power in all its forms to secure the present and future is ultimately a leadership challenge. That challenge is especially complex in the current century when the forms and patterns of security are changing in so many ways at an accelerated pace than ever before. The capabilities required to threaten a nation, region, or even global stability are available to both rich and impoverished nation states, as well as small networks of people who can and do operate relatively independent of any nation state. There is more data available than ever before to make sense of this era.