Embracing Innovation: The ODNI Roadmap’s Impact on Industry and Technology

Acuity Vice President, Intelligence Community, KC Wilberg recently shared his thoughts in the WashingtonExec article, “Acuity’s KC Wilberg Reacts to ODNI’s IT Roadmap.” KC delves even further into the topic in the piece below:

The “Vision for the IC Information Environment,” the ODNI’s IT roadmap, was devised by more than 100 technical leaders across the intelligence community (IC). It outlines an approach to inform investment, drive cultural change, and achieve positive outcomes by pushing IT to the forefront of better mission capabilities. Let’s take a look at what the roadmap includes, and what it means for IC and industry.

Five Areas of Focus in the ODNI IT Roadmap

The roadmap details five areas targeted for investments over the next five years to ensure the United States advances our IT to maintain a strategic advantage.

As provided in the document, “The IC needs to embrace new technologies that can reshape the intelligence process and rapidly deliver valuable intelligence to policymakers, operators, and warfighters to remain ahead of those seeking to undermine and threaten the United States and its allies and partners.”

To ensure we achieve these results, the Director of National Intelligence and the Intelligence Community CIO defined five focus areas centered on advancing our IT:

1. Fortify the Mission with a Reliable and Resilient Digital Foundation. Investment in a strong, resilient, and interoperable foundation of network, computing, storage, security, and IT services.
2. Assure the Mission with Robust Cybersecurity. Ensuring Zero Trust (ZT) is central to securing the IC Information Environment (IE) with modern cybersecurity to counter modern threats.
3. Enable the Mission with Modern Practices and Partnerships. Success is dependent upon strong partnerships with DoD; foreign partners; federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal government partners; industry and academia. Likewise, the IC’s future mission success will depend on its ability to remain competitive technologically and ensure technology is accessible to all its workforce.
4. Enhance the Mission with Data Centricity. The IC must shift away from organizational and system0centric paradigms to one that is data-centric while preserving organizational equities, authorities, and rights; implementing legal/compliance frameworks; and enforcing security.
5. Accelerate the Mission with Advanced Technologies and Workforce Readiness. With the rapid advancements in AI, preparing for increased human and machine teaming is the current frontier for intelligence. The IC will need to accelerate adoption of advanced technologies while ensuring the workforce is ready to take advantage of the capabilities.
   (Source: Vision for the IC Information Environment, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/CIO/IC-IT-Roadmap-Vision-For-the-IC-Info-Environment-May2024.pdf.)

The Impact of the ODNI Roadmap on Industry

This roadmap not only demonstrates the IC’s focus on technology, but it also provides a glimpse into what IC entities will require from industry in the coming years. Industry can no longer hope to be a valued Mission partner by simply identifying and providing quality talent to the Mission. We must increase investment in defining, developing, and advancing truly discriminating solutions in the areas of IT modernization, data enablement, and hyperautomation to address specific Mission challenges. Also, we must develop solutions with cybersecurity as a primary focus.

Anticipating the Changes Ahead

The roadmap comes at a significant time. Advancing technologies and capabilities such as AI and Machine Learning are significantly impacting the IC and its Mission. While AI will enhance the collection and processing of intelligence, providing faster and more accurate insights, our adversaries can also use it to impede the safety and resilience of our networks. This double-edged sword requires the IC to quickly develop innovative technologies, methods, and delivery mechanisms to thwart attacks while also advancing personnel development to take full advantage of emerging technologies.

In addition, the activities outlined in the ODNI roadmap will give the IC the ability to use data more effectively. Today, vast amounts of IC data are stored separately, with specialized data protections and security requirements. To take full advantage of all data residing across the IC, we need to break down traditional barriers to information discovery.

However, true data-centricity will only come with the implementation of a common data strategy that leverages AI to deliver analytics at speed and scale. As defined in the IC Data Strategy 2023-2025, “The adoption of a data-centric focus is core to developing machine-assisted data discovery, precise and unambiguous data interpretability, data interoperability, AI- and machine-assisted analytic workflows, community collaboration, clearly defined measures of data quality, and to preserving integrity and provenance.” Realizing this goal will provide mission users and decision makers faster access to quality data at the speed of Mission, allowing the IC to address and respond to intelligence needs in advance of our adversaries as world events evolve.

Embracing Technology for the Sake of the Mission

The intelligence community has long struggled to balance keeping pace with rapid technology advancement with ensuring the security of technological assets. However, it is no longer acceptable to be two versions behind the latest tech if we want our IT posture to be a strategic advantage over our rivals. The IC must adapt and accelerate our adoption approach until our IT posture moves past current to leading edge. The guidance of the ODNI roadmap will enable the IC and industry to move forward together.

Read more of KC Wilberg’s thoughts about the Intelligence Community in the article, “Open Source Intelligence Strategy Encourages IC to Embrace New Tech.”