Conference on Understanding and Improving Intelligence Analysis

[davidbfpo]

Last month I attended this international conference in London, hosted by the intelligence and security Studies of Brunel University and the University of Mississippi, a rather unconventional mix was on offer:

...cross-disciplinary discussion about the value of learning from other fields to improve both the understanding and the practice of intelligence analysis.

Professionals in other fields—including medicine, the social and behavioural sciences, history and historiography, anthropology and other disciplines engaged in ethnographic research, econometric forecasting, and legal reasoning—also face many similar challenges to those that exist in intelligence analysis, including:

Difficulties acquiring information from a wide variety of sources
Vetting and evaluating the information that is acquired
Deriving understanding and meaning from that information
Impact of deadlines, editing, and other production processes on accuracy of analysis and assessment
Problems in dissemination and distribution to consumers or customers
Managing relationship between producer and consumer (role, responsibility, independence & objectivity)
Developing professional infrastructure (recruit, select, train, & develop personnel; code of ethics)
Overcoming impact of changing technology and alternative information distribution systems
How do practitioners in various non-intelligence fields overcome these kinds of challenges? How are their challenges similar to or different from those that exist in the intelligence arena? What can be learned from the comparison?

Most of the presentations are on:http://sas.olemiss.edu/bciss/materials.php