News From USJFCOM: Experiment results to improve interagency, multinational information sharing


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Experiment results to improve interagency, multinational information sharing

USJFCOM’s Joint Concept Development and Experimentation Directorate released the results of an experiment that looked into the best ways for agencies share information in multinational and interagency environments.

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By Jacob Boyer
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. - April 7, 2010) -- Personnel at U.S. Joint Forces Command's (USJFCOM) Joint Concept Development and Experimentation Directorate recently released the results of an experiment that should improve the way DoD, other government agencies and multinational partners share information.

The Interagency Shared Situational Awareness (IA SSA) Limited Objective Experiment looked into improving how agencies share information over different networks, said Navy Cmdr. Chad Hixson, IA SSA project lead.

Hixson said that agencies working together typically share by exception, restricting access to critical information until other agencies are cleared for access. The experiment was held with an eye toward making information sharing the norm.

"The need to share information is always going to butt heads with the need to protect information. The default reaction is to share by exception," he said. "Even given those information assurance attitudes, we, as a military, increasingly have a requirement to deal more and more with coalitions, interagency, and multinational partnerships. The only way to build a better partnership is to increase the trust relationships, overcome some of the cultural barriers to sharing information between organizations. It's going to have to start turning into share as a rule with our partners and withhold by exception, in order to make sure everybody's got the same idea and has the same situational awareness of what's happening."

One method of sharing information that has been used in the past has been for agencies to "push" information from the Web sites they maintained - called portals - to a central portal from which others could draw that information, Hixson said. The pushing involved sending data - including imagery, text chats and shared files - that an agency wanted to share to that portal.

Under the system suggested by the project, agencies would keep their information on their own portals, which would then share that information with a central portal; during the IA SSA experiment this portal was called the Virtual Exchange Information Center (VEIC), Hixson said.

Any agency sharing information would put information in an "exposed" area of its own portal, which could then be accessed through the VEIC, using a single sign-in, a concept referred to as "federation" of portals. Representatives from different agencies would thus be able to search, find, and have access to whatever information other agencies had exposed, from a single location. Hixson was quick to point out that, technology really is not a limiting factor in establishing the many linkages required to federate disparate sites.

During the experiment, the Department of Homeland Security provided the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), an interagency-centric collaborative network, for hosting the VEIC. However, Hixson said that any network could have been used to house such a central collaborative site.

"You would just access all the information contained on all the distributed, disparate portals via … this VEIC," Hixson said. "If the VEIC was a depository of anything, it was a depository of links to the other portals. Instead of a repository of documents, the idea would be single-site logon, search for the information, and it would go out and find the information from all the portals and display it for you. When you clicked on it, you would be taken back to the actual exposed data from that player."

Hixson said recent interagency and multinational efforts, like Operation Unified Response in the aftermath of January's earthquake in Haiti, highlight the need for agencies to share information more effectively. Five notional scenarios were used to facilitate the IA SSA experiment, and one actually involved a massive hurricane moving through that country and the Dominican Republic.

"There was a lot of information sharing between [U.S. Southern Command, the State Department, DHS, and the U.S. Agency for International Development]. The information sharing technique we used is something that could really have applicability."

Other information-sharing methods were used during the experiment, but Hixson said the VEIC was by far the best. The VEIC was found to be more effective than its closest competitor, "on the order of 85 percent to 10 percent."

"It was dramatically better using this collaborative environment," he continued. "We saw a 60 percent decrease in email whenever the VEIC was being used. This is important because email is a point-to-point way of sharing information. What we introduced is a many-to-many way of sharing information. Instead of sending my document directly to 20 people via email, I simply expose it. Now everybody playing in the experiment had the ability to get to it if they cared about it."

The results from the experiment have been drafted and sent to those who can use it, Hixson said. He said he would like to see those results used soon, so agencies can begin building the institutional trust that is crucial to the free flow of information.

"Let's just get the collaboration going, regardless of whether or not we're anticipating a crisis or not," he said. "What this will do is build some relationships and trust between organizations. Whether a crisis happens or not, we're still collaborating. Then if something does happen, it's second nature to collaborate because we will have been doing it for months."