Share - Or Else...
Including information sharing skills and competencies as one facet of a review process is usually a good thing but it cannot be the only practice to encourage a more participatory environment. If improved information sharing was made possible simply through inclusion as a metric within performance evaluations we would have solved this problem decades ago. It's more complicated. But - when implemented properly, this can be a valid institutional approach.
If federal employees do not personally adopt a policy of sharing intelligence information, they may soon face a poor performance review, the government's top information-sharing czar warned Monday at an intelligence conference.
Thomas McNamara, program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, told an audience gathered at the annual Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Conference that a mandate to share information that the intelligence community follows should be extended governmentwide.
If members of the intelligence community hinder the sharing of information with colleagues, managers can include such actions in annual performance reviews. McNamara said the same disincentive to not share information should be applied to all government employees so that the culture shifts from one based on "need to know" to "need to share."
"It would be a disaster for the country" if the culture of information sharing did not permeate all federal agencies, said McNamara, whom President Bush appointed in 2006 as head of information sharing, a job established by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act.
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