Knowledge management offers hope for homeland security

IN AN ADDRESS to more than 100 IT executives last week at the 21st Century High Tech forum, U.S. President George W. Bush said technology plays a key role in fighting terrorism, a statement punctuated by the government's $53 billion technology spending budget allocated for next year.

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In addition, the government's recent formation of a cabinet-level homeland security department designed to coordinate terrorism intelligence among various agencies raises questions about how improved data sharing will come about.

With these signals that the government has recognized the critical importance of information sharing, vendors of technology designed to help enterprises share and manage knowledge are eyeing a chance to lay the technological groundwork for the Department of Homeland Security and other emerging anti-terrorism efforts.

Putting people into the information sharing equation is a vital step toward connecting the dots between multiple intelligence agencies, according to Dan Rasmus, vice president for knowledge and information management at Giga Information Group, in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

One of the basic KM (knowledge management) failures of Sept. 11 was the lack of a network of people, he said.

"[People can] put information in databases, but if you don't have the sensory network of people it is not a compete view of information," Rasmus said.

Intelligence agencies need to look at the sources of data and then deploy technology to bring those sources together to look for patterns across the sources, according to Rasmus.

"It is a collaborative thing on the front end, followed by analytics on the back end," he said.

Although the government has a huge effort underway for business intelligence and OLAP to look at transactions in structured data sources, intelligence agencies are in dire need of unstructured textual analysis to find patterns in unstructured data, he said.

Rasmus said companies such as Clear Forest and Autonomy are working with the government to facilitate this direction.

According to Steve Roth, Carnegie Mellon University senior research scientist and CEO of software company Maya Viz, the government needs a different currency for storing data, based on the structure of information, not who is providing it.

The high-profile information-sharing failures in the FBI and CIA were due to lack of visibility into information, he said.

"What we need to do is get the information in a format that [we can] disseminate to a wide group of people who can decide if their hunches are worth following up on or are related to other pieces of information," he said.

Roth has worked with the DARPA (Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency) to find new ways for teams across the different military services to gather and share information.

Maya Viz's technology combines elements of collaboration, knowledge management, and business intelligence to bring data into a visual form that can be manipulated and shared. The technology was first deployed in military command situations, Roth said.

The company's component architecture aims to transform relational database information pieces into nuggets, visualize them, then through peer-to-peer connections allow people to share the information with anyone, Roth said.

Roth said the Defense Department's research and development arm is investing in this nugget-based technology.

"In contrast to big complicated databases these thing are just nuggets like Web pages and they can sit in a sea of data," Roth said. "We are excited because it creates information liquidity. People can search data, break off pieces."

Meanwhile, KM vendor Tacit Knowledge Systems is in talks with a number of federal agencies about using its technology to solve information-sharing problems.

Tacit's software automatically discovers expertise and activity across large organizations and connects people and information. The software taps into existing content sources such as document repositories and e-mail archives to discover individual expertise and activity, then makes end-users aware of relevant colleagues and data.

Technology that allows you to know which of your colleagues is working on what has broad applicability in the counter-terrorism effort, said David Gilmour, president and CEO of Tacit, in Palo Alto, Calif.

"[The U.S. has] 170,000 people working together to prevent attacks on this country. That is an incredibly complex process, using multiple IT system to record information about case research, various memos," he said

"To have a system that could tap into all those multiple information repositories to figure out who is working on what -- that could be phenomenally valuable to make critical connections between people," Gilmour said.

In many cases, private sector technology in areas such as search and knowledge management came out of development work in government intelligence agencies, according to Matthew Berk, analyst for site technologies and operations at Jupiter Media Metrix, in New York.

KM and search technology vendor Verity, for example, originated from research work in the CIA. In addition, Verity's technology is currently deployed in the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency, as well as multiple braches of the armed services, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Increased spending on information technology will help solve what is an intimidating effort, he said.

"[The government] wants to listen to cell [phone] conversation in Belgium and correlate it to e-mail sent in Indonesia and come up with [information] about an impending terrorist attack. It has to involve a mash of technologies and different languages.

"The technological requirements at this point, are daunting. We can throw money at it, but these problem will take a while to sort of out," he said.

For its part, Atomica is seeking to expand the role of its information unification technology in government agencies. The company's technology is currently used by agencies such as the Census Bureau and the U.S. Geological Survey, according to Mike Stangl, president and COO of Atomica, in Burlingame, Calif.

Atomica's information unification engine is designed to create a complete view of an organization's structured data, whether it resides in databases, applications, or in other agencies systems, Stangl said.

"There are tons of databases all over" in various government agencies and departments, he said. However, there is a huge political barrier -- less technological -- to integrating those, Stangl pointed out.

Atomica's technology allows senior-level management to choose which databases are indexed and which users have authority to use it.

This level of fine-grain control is important for government because "it lets agencies maintain control of data and how it is used," Stangl said.