Military intelligence agency wants to understand customers’ needs better

WASHINGTON — The chief information office of the Pentagon’s military intelligence arm has a new strategy to improve its understanding of customers’ needs.

The Defense Intelligence Agency CIO four-year strategy aims to improve the relationship with its intelligence customers after stakeholders provided feedback that said the office didn’t understand their needs or what skills the office’s workforce should have. The DIA provides military customers with intelligence about foreign countries’ military capabilities.

The strategy, released Dec. 31, includes four goals:

• Keep customers’ needs at the core of the operation.
• Make data accessible and valuable for partners.
• Optimize core services, providing needed access to networks and IT tools for customers to meet mission needs.
• Strengthen the skillsets of the office’s workforce to prepare for new technologies.

“These changes demonstrate our recognition that it is imperative to further improve our understanding of our customers and ourselves while advancing the CIO towards the North Star,” “We will accomplish this by institutionalizing the tenets of modernization, including operating as a digital organization, continuous strategic evaluation, and ensuring customer-centricity in all we do while continuing to strengthen our core infrastructure and enhance data access and availability,” wrote DIA CIO Jack Gumtow.

The office will include defense intelligence enterprise partners in its decision-making and break down “technical, administrative and cultural barriers that create data silos,” according to the strategy.

To optimize services, the office plans to use automation to increase efficiency and work to adopt emerging technologies. As technology advances, the DIA workforce must be ready to meet new mission needs.

“Our culture will be one that drives decision-making down to the lowest level and gives the workforce the authority they need to execute through collaboration, career mobility, continuous learning, and the ability to use relevant skills across the organization whenever they are necessary,” the strategy stated.

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