Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
Seriously, I see the problem with the whole article in that it confuses/conflates information/knowledge management with intelligence. The first can support or cripple the latter but it cannot replace reall intelligence--especially in the realm of intelligence analysis.

Tom
Concur wholeheartedly. What seems to be described is little more than an advanced form of near-real time targeting folders. That is a subspecies of the entire realm of intelligence operations.

Just because one has spiffy systems for filing and retrieving a bunch of data in a lot of different ways, one cannot therefore conclude that one has good intelligence. Among other things, one needs to be able to structure queries in appropriate ways to extract data from the storage and retrieval systems. One also needs to be able to look at the results of those queries, decide if they contain gaps, and decide what additional queries may be needed to fill in the gaps in the initial returns. And, IMHO, most important, one needs to be able to do the "so what" piece. In other words, to have intelligence, one needs to be able to answer the question, "What does all of the data returned by the queries allow me to infer about what is going to happen next and with how much confidence?"--

By analogy--When you try to get directions from Google Maps, you need to tell it were you want to go, when, and which type of route you want to take. The system doesn't know that first.