Using technology for collaboration in the private-sector has been commonplace for a many years now. Some organizations, like my former employer IBM, have had Usenet-style newsgroups for collaboration for over a decade. Then we had Lotus Notes team-rooms for every project, and every department. More recently tools like Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Quickr, even open source versions of the technology that delivers Wikipedia are now commonplace in todays major corporations. Well, over the weekend I saw an interesting article over at the San Francisco Chronicle on Google-technology use in the US intelligence community. Check it out here. According to the article, the CIA, FBI and NSA (and others) are all collaborating using Google as a backbone for their “Intellipedia” solution. A Wikipedia-type application where users can update and view the latest intelligence for a particular focus area. Remember the FBI’s failed Virtual Case File system? Intellipedia sounds like a much better solution to me… For the purposes of the blog, I’m more interested in the technology aspect of this solution (not the conspiracy theories noted in the article). The Lotus Notes databases I referred to above were really a pain to find items in, especially if you had to search in multiple databases. Google Desktop did a nice job of indexing everything, but it is a hog on resources (skipping over the security aspect of letting Google index sensitive, proprietary data for a moment).

At LiveBolt, we’re building our own infrastructure from the ground up, and we’re mostly product agnostic. We want the best tools to get the job done on time, accurately, and within budget. We continue to explore ways here to use collaboration tools to keep our costs low and provide the highest quality of work amongst a team of consultants that is scattered across the globe. Storage is relatively inexpensive, but I’ll bet IBM, as an example from my experience, could save millions of dollars if duplicate documents were eliminated from duplicate databases. Centralize the information, control the access to the information. A “data-centric” model, if you will.

My immediate thought when I heard about the inter-agency collaboration site was on authentication and authorization (of course). It would be interesting to know (as an Identity Management geek) how they’re getting access. To name a few, “Are they using standards-based federation technology?”, “Do they have a completely new authentication/authorization database the requires enrollment for Intellipedia?”, “Do they have Single (or simplified) Sign-On?”

Interesting stuff… Your thoughts or maybe even more knowledge on the solution?

Filed under: Data Centric, Identification, Security