Intelligent Enterprise

One of the keynotes at the Enterprise 2.0 conference featured a couple of guys from the CIA discussing the Intellipedia project to create an internal wiki shared by the entire U.S. national intelligence community.

They shared many good nuggets about overcoming institutional and cultural resistance. (My favorite line, "in our work, 'collaborator' has a very different connotation.")

They also quoted from the now famous, "Section 11: General Interference with Organizations and Production," from the 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Manual (OSS -- Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA). To quote:

1. Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit shortcuts that would expedite decisions.

2. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration."

3. Haggle over precise wordings of communications.

4. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments.

5. Question whether a decision lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

It would seem many of our enterprises commit self-sabotage...
(BTW, in case you were curious about the technology underneath Intellipedia, like many efforts that seek to at least mimic Wikipedia, they use MediaWiki, the same tool that powers the real Wikipedia.)