All the clues were there: Student pilots interested in flying planes but not landing them; Osama bin Laden wanting to hijack a plane; funds being transferred to the United States from known bin Laden operatives.
What was missing was a way for law enforcement and intelligence agencies that had this information to connect the dots. There was no system or procedure to assemble these related facts gathered by a diverse collection of government agencies.
Being able to do this — and alerting officials before another strike occurs — will be one of the main priorities for the President Bush’s proposed Department of Homeland Security. The department will tap information from foreign intelligence, law enforcement and intelligence agencies and publicly available information to look for future threats.
To accomplish this task, the new department will be leaning heavily on computing power to collect, store and analyze information.
“What we’re talking about is pattern recognition, or use of software intelligent agents to peruse data, [which are] driven by algorithms and rules that define themselves over time,” said Steve Cooper, the chief information officer of the Homeland Security Office, during a July 16 press briefing. Such tools “can marry statistically derived outcomes from known events to predictive models,” he said.
Such a project could be the most ambitious knowledge management effort ever attempted by either the government or a private company, said Jennifer Hill, director of public-sector strategy of SAS Institute Inc., Cary, N.C., which specializes in business intelligence software.
“I don’t think there is anything to compare to how many different bureaus and agencies are being tied together in homeland security,” Hill said. “I’ve never seen that many mergers and acquisitions at one company.”
Sanjay Poonen, vice president of worldwide marketing for business intelligence software provider Informatica Corp., Palo Alto, Calif., said, “The nature of what the government wants to do with analytics goes way beyond what normal business intelligence software can offer.”
As for the cost, Tom Siebel, chief executive officer of customer relationship management software vendor Siebel Systems Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., said the system that Cooper envisions could cost up to $1 billion.
Perry Luzwick, director of business development of mission support systems for Northrop Grumman Corp.’s information technology division, said $1 billion would be a realistic estimate if the system were built to interact not only with other federal agencies, but with state and local agencies, utility systems and other commercial systems as well.
“I wouldn’t even want to ballpark an estimate,” said Hill, who conceded that it would not be “a $1 million project.”
Which is not to say it cannot be done. Integrators and vendors are confident such a system can be built, if the government plans correctly and executes carefully.
