The Intelligence Community achieved a significant milestone in its digital transformation journey with the May release of the Vision for the IC Information Environment. This comprehensive document lays out specific goals to guide the community toward information technology excellence, and according to IC Chief Information Officer Adele Merritt, it took a “digital village” to make it happen.
Learn about the IC’s efforts to revolutionize its IT capabilities at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Intel Summit on Sept. 19, where government and industry leaders will come together to tackle the IC’s top challenges and priorities. To learn more and register for the event, click here.
“We [designed it] in a very collaborative way because we recognized that we couldn’t write a roadmap and dictate to everybody where they needed to go,” Merritt said during a webinar hosted by the Intelligence & National Security Alliance in August.
IC Turns to Industry Partners
To create the document, the IC reached beyond its 18 components and extended a hand to the private sector, which the organization’s IT leadership recognized for its long history as a partner to the U.S. government. This experience, said Merritt, made it clear that industry could help the IC tackle its IT challenges, many of which it shares with other agencies.
Building the roadmap began “with an industry-informed look at the landscape.” To gain a commercial perspective, the IC asked its partners to take a survey about “where industry feels that they are going in the future.”
“We needed to be informed by their missions, by the technology that they think they need for their future needs,” she said.
The responses were instrumental in determining the timeline for the roadmap, which, after much deliberation, was set to five years.
“We looked at one year, two years, five years and 10 years out, and when we were developing the scope for the roadmap, we didn’t want it to be science fiction,” Merritt explained. “We also didn’t want to make it two years because that was too close — we needed this to be a strategic planning document.”
These conversations also helped the IC consolidate the roadmap’s objectives.
“We decided that we could really only handle five focus areas, maybe with five sub areas to it, and when you see the final document, it has five focus areas with a collection of 19 key initiatives,” said Merritt. “We realized that if we were biting off more than that, we might not have a chance of achieving them.”
Accessibility was a major consideration as the IC worked through this process. The roadmap was made available online, which “was done by design.”
“We need to be talking with our partners at an unclassified level, letting them know where we’re going so there’s not a classified compendium of this,” said Merritt. “This was not written on the high side and downgraded for the low side — we designed this from the beginning to be available and accessible to the public.”
Learn More About Intel Community’s IT Transformation
Numerous IC officials and industry experts will gather at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Intel Summit to discuss current and future IC goals. The event will feature numerous IT leaders and include a panel discussion on how the IC can accelerate IT modernization. To gain access to all the 2024 Intel Summit has to offer, register to attend the event on the Potomac Officers Club website.
