Sunday, January 3, 2010

Need To Know vs. Need To Share

The Cold-War culture that I was exposed to in the US military and still permeates the federal government is that information should be made available on a "need to know" basis. This approach might have made some sense during the cold war but, after 9/11, it seems to make much less sense today. The cultural change being pushed right now is the "need to share".

What hopefully will not get lost in the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Some things need to remain in the federal government stove pipes and other things need to be shared. The Markle Task Force on National Security has developed a balanced set of initiatives for information sharing emphasizing: (1) Privacy and civil liberties protection, (2) Discoverability "... offering users the ability to 'discover' data that exists elsewhere without gaining access to the underling information until the user requesting access is authorized and authenticated", (3) An "authorized use" standard for information sharing and (4) Culture change from need-to-know to need-to-share.

Particularly to the second point on discoverability, I would (1) add the important motivational element of creating a publish/subscribe system--if agencies publish, they also get to subscribe ("share-to-play") and (2) emphasize the importance of starting with basic, standardized information about events of importance to national security. Here is the relevant paragraph from the Markle Foundation report on Discoverability:

Discoverability is the first step in an effective system for information sharing, offering users the ability to “discover” data that exists elsewhere. Data is tagged at the point of collection with standardized information (e.g., who, what, where, when) and submitted to a central index. Just as a card catalogue in a library serves as a central index, directing users to relevant books—but doesn’t provide the book itself—these “data indices” point users to data holders and documents, depending on the search criteria used.

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