How To Improve Your Open Source Search Skills -- One Day At A Time!

If you scratch the surface of the web you will find a ton of articles, websites and videos about how to search for information more efficiently.

Not that this makes any difference.

Students, according to the Project For Information Literacy, "while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research." The report goes on to say, "Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research."

There are a number of reasons to be worried about this. Many people tend to focus on the over-reliance on Google as the search engine of first resort. While some of that logic is true (for an interesting and illuminating experiment that makes the point, I recommend this site...), I find the inability to use even Google very well to be one of my largest concerns. I mean, if you are going to rely only on Google, you ought to be incredibly good at finding stuff with it.

The best way, in my mind, to get good at finding stuff with Google is to practice doing it and Google apparently feels the same way. The Wizards of Mountain View are now offering a game that is designed to use "your creativity and clever search skills". The premise is simple. They ask a question and then you use Google to find the answer. The game is called "Google a Day". You can try today's challenge below:

I can easily imagine this as an icebreaker in a computer equipped classroom or as a homework or extra credit assignment. Leave your own ideas in the comments!

How Many Entry-level Analysts Does The US IC Need This Year? (Survey)

Good question, right?

If you have direct knowledge of information that might help answer the question in the title or you have indirect knowledge that is relevant to the answer to the question in the title, please take 2 minutes to complete this survey.

What do I mean by direct and indirect knowledge?

Direct knowledge means that you know personally or have good information concerning the hiring plans of your agency or organization (or at least your section or division).  You might work in HR or be a manager with hiring responsibilities.

Indirect knowledge is information that is relevant to the question that is not due to your direct responsibilities.  You might have spoken with an HR manager or have been involved in meetings where this issue was discussed.

We are NOT looking for opinion based on purely circumstantial information.  If you are not involved in the hiring process either directly or indirectly, please DO NOT take this survey.

Why are we interested?

Every year, other disciplines announce hiring projections for the year:  "This year's hot jobs are for engineers and chimney sweeps."  That sort of thing.  Entry level intelligence analysts who are searching for a job, on the other hand, receive no such guidance. 

We hope to change that.  Working with one of our hot-shot grad students, Whitney Bergendahl, and my colleague and marketing expert, Shelly Freyn, we put together this survey to get a better feel for the the job market for entry level analysts for the year ahead. 

Once we get enough survey data, Whitney will compile it and combine it with the macro-level, mostly qualitative data that we already have and put together a "jobs report" for the year ahead.  I will publish it here once we are done.

We understand that there are some legitimate security concerns here so we have tried to frame the questions such that they are focused on broad developments and general trends.  We are not interested in the kind of deep details that might compromise security.

Finally, we intend to follow this study up with similar surveys of the law enforcement and business job markets for entry-level intelligence analysts as well.

Thanks for your participation!

Two New "Intelligence In Business" Blogs Of Note

Competitive Intelligence?  Too narrowly defined.  Strategic and Competitive Intelligence?  Too long.  Industrial Espionage?  Illegal.  Commercial Intelligence?  Better but easy to confuse with the other two "CIs". 

Whatever you tend to call it (and, as the title to this post indicates, I prefer "Intelligence In Business" or IIB), intelligence analysis as a function in the business world is growing very quickly.  More and more companies are waking up to the idea that internally focused operational efficiency is not enough --  they need to better understand the world of events, people and organizations that are relevant to their success or failure but are outside their control as well.

To paraphrase a well known military thinker:  "Know the competitor, the customer, the regulatory environment, your supply chain's vulnerabilities, the limits of your hiring pool, etc. and know yourself and you will succeed in all your battles."

That is a bit of a lengthy intro to two relatively new blogs that can help anyone new to the wild west of IIB understand it a bit better:

i-intelligence.  There are few people I know who are both as articulate and consistently right as Chris Pallaris.  His company, i-intelligence, is based in Switzerland but operates all over the world.  He and his team do not post often (so don't worry about getting overwhelmed by spam) but it always makes for interesting reading.  Of even more value, perhaps, is i-intelligence's twitter feed which can be (conveniently) found at @i-intelligence.  There Chris and his team cull and curate a stream of articles that should be interesting to anyone involved in intelligence.

MGT Analytics.  Whether it is making the theoretical real to the business person or just explaining the basics of intel, this new blog, run by Mike Thomas, looks like it is going to definitely be worth following.  I have known Mike since he was a student here at Mercyhurst and have always been impressed with the clarity of his insight.  More important than my intuitions, however, are Mike's wide range of real-world experience.  He has known both success and failure so there will be no pollyanna-ish leanings here.  Likewise, he has traveled extensively, taught accounting in China, gotten his masters, worked for the TSA, been a cyberthreat analyst and is now founding his second company.   Clearly worth a look.

The Intelligence Analyst's Deck Of Cards Is Here! (Pictures And Update)

The cards came in last week and look fantastic!  Take a look at the unboxing pics below:

Cool, eh?

We should begin shipping out the complimentary copies to everyone who submitted a quote today.  If you don't get your copy by 15 NOV, drop me a note (kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu) with your mailing address.

Pre-orders made through the Mercyhurst Bookstore's online ordering service have already begun to be shipped.  If you are interested in ordering fewer than 10 copies, you can continue to do so through the bookstore.

We are offering pretty sizable bulk discounts as well.  If you want to order 10 or more copies (for all your training/morale building/Christmas needs!),

As a reminder, all profits from the sale of the cards will go to fund the activities of our three student intel clubs.

RFI: Should Intelligence Analysis Be More Like Competitive Diving?

Quick!  Which is more difficult:  A jackknife or three and a half somersaults from a tuck position? In case you are not familiar with these dives, you can see videos of both below.





Now, here is the more difficult question: How much more difficult is a 3.5 from the tuck than a jackknife?

The answer is about 2.3 times more difficult. How do I know this? Because I checked out the handy diving tables at FINA (the international organization that regulates diving). I'm no expert but my reading of the tables says that a 3.5 from the tuck is a dive with a 3 point difficulty while a forward dive from the pike position (a jackknife?) is a 1.3 point dive.

Note that the degree of difficulty is simply a multiplier for the actual score of the dive. It is theoretically possible that a perfect jackknife would beat a lousy 3.5 somersault.

Intelligence, right now, is all about scoring the dive. Degree of difficulty? Not so much. 

I am hoping to change that...

We spend a good bit of time in intelligence talking about forecasting accuracy and we should.  Saying accurate things about the future is arguably much more valuable to decisionmakers than saying accurate things about the present or past.  It is also inherently more difficult.

Even when we are trying to say accurate things about the future, though, some questions are easier to answer than others.  Quick!  Which is more difficult to answer:  Is there likely to be a war somewhere in the Middle East in the next 100 years or is there likely to be a war between Israel and Egypt within the next 24 months?  I am no Middle East expert but it seems to me that the first question is much easier than the second.  I am guessing that most readers of this blog would say the same thing.

Why?   What are the essential elements of a question that make it obviously more or less difficult to answer?  How do we generalize these criteria across all questions?

I am not the only person to recognize the inherent difficulties in different kinds of questions.  Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA and NSA, likes to tell this story:

"Some months ago, I met with a small group of investment bankers and one of them asked me, 'On a scale of 1 to 10, how good is our intelligence today?'  I said the first thing to understand is that anything above 7 isn't on our scale. If we're at 8, 9, or 10, we're not in the realm of intelligence—no one is asking us the questions that can yield such confidence. We only get the hard sliders on the corner of the plate."

Note that Hayden highlighted the degree of difficulty of the questions (not the difficulty of obtaining the information or the complications associated with supporting political appointees or the lack of area experts or anything else) as the reason for more realistic expectations for the intelligence community's analysts.

So...if degree of question difficulty is the missing half of the "evaluating intelligence" equation, shouldn't someone be working on a diving-like degree of  dfficulty table for intel analysts?

That is precisely what I, along with one of our top graduate students, Brian Manning, have set out to do this year.  This research question piqued our interest primarily because of our involvement in the DAGGRE Research Project (more on that soon). 

In that project, we are asking questions (lots of them) that all have to be resolvable.  That is, they have to all have an answer eventually ("Will Moammar Ghaddafi be President of Libya after 31 DEC 2011?" is a resolvable question -- he either will or he won't be president after that date). 

My concern was that this is not the way that most questions are actually asked by the decisionmakers that intel typically supports.  For example, I would expect that the Ghaddafi question would come at me in the form of "So, what is going to happen with Ghaddafi?"  A very different question and, intuitively, much more difficult to answer.

So far our research has turned up some interesting answers from the fields of linguistics, artificial intelligence and, from all places, marketing. We expect to find interesting answers in other fields (like philosophy) but have not yet. 

Our goal is to sort through this research and figure out if any of the existing answers to this "question about questions" makes any sense for intel professionals.  Alternatively, we might take elements from each answer and kludge them together into some steampunk-looking difficulty of question generator.  We just don't know at this point. 

What we are looking for is good ideas, in general, and, in particular, any real research into how to rank questions for difficulty.

The comments section is now open!