Preliminary Perspectives on Information Passing in the Intelligence Community

Abstract

Analyst sensemaking research typically focuses on individual or small groups conducting intelligence tasks. This has helped understand information retrieval tasks and how people communicate information. As a part of the grand challenge of the Summer Conference on Applied Data Science (SCADS) to build a system that can generate tailored daily reports (TLDR) for intelligence analysts, we conducted a qualitative interview study with analysts to increase understanding of information passing in the intelligence community. While our results are preliminary, we expect that this work will contribute to a better understanding of the information ecosystem of the intelligence community, how institutional dynamics affect information passing, and what implications this has for a TLDR system. This work describes our involvement in and work completed during SCADS. Although preliminary, we identify that information passing is both a formal and informal process and often follows professional networks due especially to the small population and specialization of work. We call attention to the need for future analysis of information ecosystems to better support tailored information retrieval features.