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Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of
Information & Analysis (OIA) Information Sharing
Challenges
In order to promote a unified, DHS-wide
information-sharing environment, it is critical that each
DHS component share potential terrorism, homeland security,
law enforcement, and related information within the agency.
As such, DHS Action Officers must have timely access to all
relevant information they need to successfully perform their
duties.
Because essential information was not
being shared or standardized between DHS organizations,
Action Officers were unable to quickly and easily retrieve
the DHS intelligence data they needed. Consequently, the DHS
OIA sought process enhancements to streamline and shorten
the process for information sharing.
Solutions
DRC conducted Business Process
Reengineering (BPR) to standardize data nomenclature,
formalize data collection standards, retrieve relevant
intelligence from component organizations, and share
information with interested stakeholders.
After performing a current and future
state analysis of DHS policies and procedures for
information sharing with respect to the expectations and
resulting documentation of DHS component organization Action
Officers, DRC developed new standards for retrieving and
sharing data. This data was determined by meeting
individually and in groups with 15 Action Officers from 12
DHS component organizations and vetted with all 22
components.
Following the determination of relevant
metadata, DRC created a standard template for Action
Officers (AO) tasks,
consisting of a high level summary so that Action Officers
can find relevant task details more quickly and respond to
their requestors in a more-timely manner.
In order to improve responsiveness, DRC
provided outreach to Action Officers to assist them in
appropriately setting expectations. We also made
recommendations for relevant resources and Subject Matter
Experts (SMEs). This education, training, and outreach
included developing an Action Officer Guidebook specifically
for how to respond to various tasks requiring specific and
specialized knowledge.
Benefits/Achievements
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Our Action Officer templates are
currently being rolled out across all 22 DHS component
organizations, and are so successful that DHS is
planning to incorporate them into a new portal-enabled
process.
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We recommended and implemented new
metrics to improve timeliness and quality of Action Officers response
to Tasks.
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