The wiki enables CIA staffers to better organize and securely share information, keep track of what’s known and who found it, and avoid duplicate efforts so they can focus on filling in what they don’t yet know.

Doug Belzer writes in Washington Technology about the CIA’s internal wiki use, and the effort it’s taken for internal proponents like Sean Dennehy and Don Burke to overcome skepticism and demonstrate its value.

The CIA was initially skeptical about whether a wiki was even right for the intelligence community. Burke says the initial reaction went something like this:

“We just went through 9/11, through Iraq, and now this guy is saying we can go and make edits in the middle of the night on a wiki page?”

But the agency found that many intelligence staffers wanted tools that would help them work more closely, share and organize the bits and pieces of information they gather, and put together the pieces of larger puzzles they’re working to solve.

One feature that was attractive to the intelligence community is the back-and-forth debate that happens among editors of encyclopedia entries. A place for intelligence officers to debate topics fits well with the way they are used to working, Burke said.

In Intellipedia, edits to an entry are dated and attributed to the person who made the edit. That kind of record is important to agencies such as the CIA, Dennehy said. “In the intelligence community, we are often asked, ‘What did you know, and when did you know it?’ ” he said.

Access Permissions: Unclassified, Classified, and Top Secret

Information in the agency’s wiki, dubbed Intelipedia, is organized based on the same three levels of secrecy that are used anywhere else intelligence is stored:

Intellipedia exists in three networks: unclassified, classified and top secret. It allows anyone with access to those networks to read the information but only lets authenticated users make edits.

Aside from the obviously more dramatic labels used in the intelligence community, this is not all that different from a business organizing information in the wiki based on departments like design, engineering, marketing, sales, & support, or a university organizing information in the wiki based on categories like courses, research labs, and administrative departments.

Greater Adoption More About Culture Than Technology

Dennehy says that wiki use is still in its earliest phases, and the biggest challenge is convincing people that there’s value in using the wiki:

At this point, getting greater adoption is more a cultural problem than a technology problem. Emphasizing that Web 2.0 is a good way to share important data is one way to gain new adopters, Dennehy said. It is also effective at limiting duplicated efforts. If one user sees that information about a topic already exists, he doesn’t waste time re-authoring that same information. But if the user has a new perspective on the topic, he can add that information.