یک مدل فرایند اطلاعاتی مبتنی بر رویکرد مشارکتی An intelligence process model based on a collaborative approach

The traditional intelligence cycle is a conceptual model showing how intelligence operations are conducted. It consists of four steps (direction, collection, processing, and dissemination) from defining what the decision-maker needs to know to the reception of the answer that he asked for. During the last decades, many criticisms and discussions were addressed towards the intelligence cycle [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. Gregory F. Treverton in his book Reshaping national intelligence for an age of information [2] asserts that “…The changes in the world that are already apparent are more than enough to require a complete reshaping of intelligence, and the extension of those changes into the future of the market state will only sharpen that need”. On his side, Mark Lowenthal affirms in his book Intelligence: from secrets to policy [4] that: “…The intelligence cycle representation misrepresents some aspects and misses many others. First, it is overly simple. Its end to end completeness misses many of the vagaries in the process. It is also oddly unidimensional. A policy maker asks questions and after a few steps gets an answer. There is no feedback, and the diagram does not convey that the process might not be completed in one cycle”. In a publication of the Center of the Study of Intelligence of the CIA, it is stated that: “…The model omits elements and fails to capture the process accurately” and “the traditional intelligence cycle model should either be redesigned to depict accurately the [1] intended goal, or care should be taken to discuss explicitly its limitations whenever it is used”.In [8], the author notices that: “…The cycle reflects a conception of information services that fit the 1940s, when the intelligence community was established and people began to discuss how intelligence could be made more effective. But from the perspective of today’s information consumer, the model falls short on several counts”. Many other criticisms are formulated in the literature but despite all these criticisms, the cycle continues to be considered as the core representation of how intelligence is functioning [5]. In addition, some authors in the open literature [1] [2], [3], [4] foster the development of a more complete representation of all elements of the process as well as the factors that influence them. There is an agreement towards the need to have a model that would capture the entire intelligence process, from the request for intelligence to its delivery, including the This paper highlights many deficiencies and issues of the traditional intelligence cycle and particularly focuses on the fact that this cycle lacks in representing the intelligence process from an all-source perspective. On one hand, the all-source activities are not represented in the traditional cycle. They are encompassed within the processing step of the cycle. On the other hand, the intelligence cycle does not provide a good basis for the understanding of the processes, the involved actors, the relationships between single source and all-source activities. The objective in this paper is to better understand, define and represent the all-source intelligence process based on a collaborative approach. roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders. The traditional intelligence cycle is reviewed and the main criticisms that were addressed in the literature are highlighted. Then, the modelling of the intelligence process is rethought from an all-source perspective and a modified model is proposed. The proposed model is composed of many activities and processes: intelligence tasking; direction; single source collection & processing; all-source discovery & fusion; dissemination; and evaluation & feedback. Three levels of detail of the model are provided. Level 1 is a high level representation of the intelligence process. Level 2 introduces the roles of intelligence personnel in each phase and specifies the main activities in the direction phase. Level 3 details the activities in the “single source collection & processing” and the “all-source discovery & fusion” phases. The proposed model presumes a collaborative approach that enables the analysis of a greater quantity of single source data by sharing analysis tasks and results between all actors from different military and non-military intelligence organizations. In addition, this paper discusses the challenges and issues and presents factors that enable or impede such collaboration.