Top Secret America is a fascinating report in the Washington Post by Dana Priest and William Arkin. They talk about how the U.S Counter Terrorism activities devolved, after 9/11, into too many agencies doing the same thing but not very effectively protecting the public with the replicated intelligence they produced.
Here is an example of what all this effort failed to identify in their own words:
Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.
These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.
In the past, I have argued for Skunk Works within companies where BI efforts are undertaken by different departments on their own since no one central effort gave them exactly what they needed.
Now playing Devil's Advocate, this is what can happen when you have too many BI efforts within a company also.
There may be too many fractional versions of the truth floating around that the key truths may be missed!
Sales may have insights into why sales is tanking, but finance may know only that sales is tanking but not why. Manufacturing may know only that they need to slow down production and reduce existing inventories.
The CEO may be missing the whole picture in the meanwhile.
Too many fractional BI efforts stand the risk of moving in the opposite direction too much.
Sometimes too much BI may be harmful also!
So what may be the answer? Somebody should be responsible for distilling a single version of the truth - pick any one version and consistenly follow it for action. As long as it is the same version it will effectively show what is important - trends!
Something to think about, reflecting upon the study in Washington Post!
Information is not knowledge - Albert Einstein
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