(US & Canada) VIDEO | Shift From System-Centric to Data-Centric Perspective — Intelligence Community CDO, Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Lori Wade, Intelligence Community Chief Data Officer, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, speaks with Kurt Rohloff, CTO and Co-founder of Duality Technologies, in a video interview about end-to-end data management, how it brings the Intelligence Community together, zero-trust architecture, collaboration, and having a common data catalog to foster data sharing, integration, and interoperability.

Wade kicks off the conversation with the topic of end-to-end data management. She emphasizes that it is a core component of the data strategy and is needed to bring the intelligence community together to understand the shaping, handling, and discovery of data.

Further, she expresses that this data management approach will fundamentally bring data standards, labeling instructions, and everything that needs to be done with data from collection to transportation, ingestion, exploitation, dissemination, and disposition.

Next, Wade asserts that to take full advantage of evolving technologies like analytics, immersive technologies, AI, the metaverse, and more, fundamental data management practices must be instilled in the present.

Thus, she refers to it as the 'end-to-end' intelligence cycle, which begins at the point of collection and goes all the way through the decisions made regarding the data and how it is marked, classified, and so on. Subsequently, this entails speed, scalability, and interoperability to shape intelligence.

Moving forward, Wade states that she has been a long-standing member of the Intelligence Community and has observed its progress through multiple redevelopments while working with local, state, tribal, territorial, federal, private sector, and liaison partners. Her focus is to bring together the intelligence community to address the challenges of the data management strategy.

Furthermore, she shares that sitting at the Federal CDO Council, she is bridging the area of data and communities. Wade interacts with the Department of Defense’s CDAO Office to put together end-to-end data management. She is looking for areas to ensure interoperability between them and get the much-needed buy-in.

Additionally, she also highlights the importance of being in lockstep with the CIO and the cybersecurity communities. Wade further stresses infrastructure compute, as all these factors collectively help to gain speed and scale the data.

In continuation, she emphasizes the "zero-trust architecture" and the need to prioritize, resource, and modernize existing legacy systems and data. She encourages collaboration and collective work between all the intelligence communities.

Wade confirms that the CIO and CISO of the Intelligence Community now both sit on her council, and they are working to align CDOs within each IC element. She notes that the team is addressing that by reshaping and making a place for CDOs at the decision-making table.

She maintains that this will help in identifying the intersections in data management and solving those to get through challenges. Thereafter, Wade expresses that, in the early stages of utilizing the word interoperability, there was a lot of discussion about it, because it is typically understood by CIOs and IT professionals.

Seeing the value of this concept, she advocates the need to shift away from a system-centric perspective to a data-centric one. This will result in common frameworks that will reduce the barriers for private sector companies to collaborate with them, notes Wade.

Consequently, data will be efficiently shared across all elements while respecting the fact that they all have their missions and ways of collecting, classifying, and analyzing data. This is especially relevant in the light of being in a data-driven world, amidst adversaries, threats, and a changing national security landscape.

Additionally, Wade encourages the Intelligence Community to work in an integrated way and share data and analytics more efficiently. To do so, IIC Data Services need to be adopted across the IC and integrated data layers built with the idea of not only sharing across a particular mission but also across various partners.

The data must be consumable by humans and machines, with the infrastructure in place to move and integrate the data, states Wade. She explains that the deployment of newer technologies like AI along with the establishment of a common data catalog will enable and reinforce data sharing, integration, and interoperability between partners.

In conclusion, she suggests that turning the concept of interoperability into a mindset as well as a practical and technical way of working is necessary for the Intelligence Community to achieve success in the future.

CDO Magazine appreciates Lori Wade for sharing her data insights with our global community.