This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will apply the concepts of process analysis, which provides a systematic and well-known means to improve the manufacturing and systems in organizations, to the challenge of obtaining intelligence information for stopping terrorism. To complete almost any activity requires a series of steps from beginning to end, and process analysis considers the totality of those steps including their individual performance and how they interact. In manufacturing applications, for example, the process starts with raw material and continues through various specific steps until the product is made. Process analysis enables one to identify bottlenecks, delays, where defects are created and so on. Most importantly, it can identify the critical few leverage points where small changes can quickly produce big improvements. Indeed, that is the hallmark of good process analysis, achieving a significant improvement fast, in just a few months.
The intelligence cycle has many powerful similarities to the manufacturing process, with the product being an excellent report instead of a quality item. The raw material is the raw data obtained from human intelligence, signal intelligence, satellites and so on. Clearly, if the raw material is poor, so will be the intelligence report. After collection the information must be filtered since much of it is noise, just a raw material must often be processed into usable form. Then the analyst does the analytical work by putting the components together into a coherent whole, just as modern manufacturing might create an advanced specialized semi-conductor. Given the similarities and abundance of knowledge about improving processes, this research hopes to identify a few critical leverage points in the production of intelligence. These leverage points then could be improved quickly thereby producing an improvement in the quality and excellence of intelligence against terrorism.
