Organizational Culture Challenges To Interagency And Intelligence Community Communication And Interaction

A significant factor contributing in many crises of the post-industrial era is the failure by the agencies making up the U.S. Government bureaucracy to communicate with each other. This failure is rooted strongly in the Government's organizational culture. This thesis paper examines the concept of organizational culture and its impact upon how the U.S. Government's Intelligence Community's agencies share information. It is this author's contention that both the overarching organizational culture of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the internal cultures of the agencies within it keep their members from sharing knowledge. Communication barriers exist because of the nature of the bureaucratic structures that gather, analyze, and distribute intelligence information in our government, and because of how members of the organizations forming the IC interact with one another. The barriers to cooperation and communication, however, can be torn down through the IC leadership's use of the tools of communication to modify the organizational culture to better coordinate the IC's interagency sharing of the fruits of their intelligence efforts. This exercise of leadership, backed by legislation for restructuring and directing and financing improved systems architecture enabling information sharing in the IC in particular, and the U.S. Government as a whole for that matter, can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the agencies at the core of the fight in the Global War on Terror.