The ISE Management Plan provides tools and info that can help agencies and organizations responsibly share information.
When Congress established the PM-ISE and mandated the creation of an information sharing environment, it was clear that the ISE would require partnerships across government to make the vision a reality. Each new ISE partner is strengthened by, and strengthens, the ISE as a whole by ensuring that those who protect our nation have the information they need. While the original congressional requirement was specific to terrorism information, the mission of ISE partners has broadened, making strategic partnerships and communications are imperative.
Within the framework of the National Strategy, it’s important to establish your organization’s goals for your communications with the ISE as a whole and with the ISE partners with which you most often share information. This helps keep your activities focused and provides a shared understanding within your organization as to what you hope to accomplish.
Because the ISE is so broad and covers large mission areas, ISE mission partners are extremely diverse. At the broadest level, your communications strategy needs to address all of these stakeholders. For example, the FBI Information Sharing and Safeguarding Report 2012 communicates to both its federal and non-federal partners by highlighting significant activities of the Bureau, in a format intended to mirror strategic issues and initiatives across the entire US Government’s diverse information sharing environment. When targeting narrower audiences, it is important to remember that stakeholder priorities will vary among the different types of organizations and individuals based on mission, community, and level of investment in ISE processes. For example, while all ISE mission partners will be interested in cutting red tape and hastening responsible information sharing, border states and towns may be particularly concerned about initiatives focused on exchanging terrorism screening information and securing the borders, while local municipalities are interested in finding better ways to improve information sharing with their state and federal partners. Communication elements to keep in mind:
Once you have established your organization’s goals for ISE communications and identified those stakeholders most important for your organization’s success, you can create an ISE communications strategy that addresses these goals and stakeholders specifically.
Contact PM-ISE’s Stakeholder Engagement Team to learn more.
As a starting point, it is best to craft key messages, using plain language. Key messages will serve as the foundation for your ISE communications. You should use these core messages repeatedly, and will just need to tweak them to address each audience’s specific needs and concerns. Your core messages may address:
The action(s) your employees should take to further your organizational goals in the ISE
Once your key messages have been established, you can use variations of them in any number of communications vehicles or channels, to include online communications and social media, press kits and releases, conferences and events, and involvement in associations and industry.
Inbound communications techniques that involve a dialogue and feedback are the hallmark of today’s communications strategies. Many of the communications techniques described earlier provide mechanisms for feedback loops. Setting up processes and methods for gathering feedback and engaging in a dialogue is not difficult, but they do require an ongoing commitment to monitor the various mechanisms, analyze the comments, and reply.
ISE partners represent a wide variety of mission categories, and each has a critical role in helping to build our collective capabilities. IN this section, we have provided a few examples of ISE partners who are creating the culture of responsible information sharing. As you will see, these actions include mission partners from many disparate ISE communities.
Building efficient and effective information sharing environments at the state and local levels is helping to solve challenges related to shrinking budgets, dynamic threats, and exploding amounts of data. Each state, has unique requirements, but states are seeing results by building ISEs based on best practices. The call to action for these efforts is the DOJ’s Global Justice Sharing Initiative’s (Global) “Strategic Solutions to Transform Our Nation’s Justice and Public Safety Information Sharing”. Released in November 2012, the paper challenges governors, sheriffs, chiefs of police, and other Global Advisory Committee (GAC)[1] members to develop single-sign-on and federated query capabilities, leverage secure cloud solutions, develop and engage in shared services and systems, ensure interoperability between law enforcement deconfliction systems, advance information sharing to support successful reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals, and to collaborate with federal partners to coordinate a consistent approach to federal funding, policy support, and universal adoption of common standards and technologies.
In line with the recommendations in the recently released report, Information Sharing: Agencies Could Better Coordinate to Reduce Overlap in Field-Based Activities (GAO-13-471), DHS continues to emphasize the importance of and monitor the level of ongoing coordination and collaboration between a number of entities: fusion centers, FBI Field Intelligence Groups (FIGs), the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Program’s Investigative Support Centers (ISC), the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) Program’s Centers, Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), and major city and county intelligence units to support implementation of the statewide fusion process.
Examples of cooperative partnerships at the state and local level include Fusion Center Partnerships, Fusion Liaison Officer Programs, P/CR/CL Protections, Field Analytic Support Task Force, and Building Communities of Trust. For a details and a more comprehensive list, go to Section 1 the ISE Annual Report.
Public-private partnerships, as defined by the National Council for Public-Private Partnership (NCPPP) are “a contractual agreement between a public agency (federal, state, or local) and a private sector entity.” The skills and assets of each sector (public and private) are shared through these agreements to deliver a service or facility for the use of the general public. DHS is a key ISE partner that leverages effective public-private partnerships to drive outcomes and support mission responsibilities.
A prime example of the need for public-private partnerships can be found in the critical infrastructure protection mission space, where over 85 percent of the nation’s infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector. The structure of the existing critical infrastructure partnership is explained at length in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), which consists of government, private sector-specific and cross-sector councils that enable government and private sector partners to engage in joint discussions and participate in a broad spectrum of information sharing activities. The desired end-state of an effective partnership model is an environment in which public and private partners work in a networked manner to effectively and efficiently share timely and actionable information and allocate risk-reduction responsibilities.
As part of its responsibility to enhance critical infrastructure security and resilience under Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), DHS along with other key federal and private sector partners, conducted an in-depth review of the current public-private partnership model in use across the Federal government. They found that “successful partnership models have a common set of attributes—they have a defined purpose; clearly articulated goals; participation from the appropriate membership; have buy-in from organizational leadership; clearly define governance; are built on a foundation of trust; include robust communication channels and mechanisms to share information; have measurable outcomes that move partners towards the articulated goals.”[2]
Canada and the U.S. are connected by critical infrastructure, from bridges and roads to energy infrastructure and cyberspace. The Beyond the Border Action Plan includes measures to enhance the resilience of our shared critical and cyber infrastructure and to enable our two countries to rapidly respond to and recover from disasters and emergencies on either side of the border.
Canada and the U.S. continued implementing the Canada-U.S. Action Plan for Critical Infrastructure, including conducting a Regional Resilience Assessment Program project for the Maine-New Brunswick region and a joint risk analysis, collaborative cross border analytical products and best practices to enhance critical infrastructure security and resilience.
PM-ISE participates in annual North America Day (NAD) talks, a forum that brings together the Chief Information Officers of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. These talks have resulted in tangible projects that are becoming prototypes for international information sharing. For example, in 2011 the three countries signed a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding and established information-sharing pilot projects to exchange test data for public health alerts and stolen vehicle information In 2012, the three countries agreed to collaborate on Open Government platform (OGPL) participation by Canada and Mexico that builds on the work of the U.S. and India; ideas for accelerating some U.S.-Canada Beyond the Border projects by extending them to include Mexico; and sharing best practices in the three countries’ identity management and authentication programs.
Further building on the NAD talks, GSA took the lead in implementing a NAD agreement to align identity management systems across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and expanded the collaboration to Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Each country's national identity experts attended a two-day Identity Summit in February 2013, and will continue to meet regularly to share ideas about identity, credentials, and access management. The participants are exploring consistent approaches to identity management by first coming to agreement on the essential factors that define identity.
Although not specific to international partners, building a culture of information sharing extends across borders. As such, the work that PM-ISE does with the International Division of the International Association of Chiefs of Police provides opportunities to further work on interoperability, especially as it relates to Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) training, metrics, and policies. PM-ISE has also worked to construct and continuously update the ISE Building Blocks provides international partners with best practices and lessons learned from other mission partners in the ISE.
Anyone can achieve their responsible information sharing goals by using the tools and processes described in this Management Plan—governance and policy; performance management; interoperability standards and frameworks; communications strategies—however, to truly achieve an ISE in which all participants responsibly share the right information, with the right people, at the right time requires a management approach that institutionalizes a culture of information sharing. To achieve this change in culture, leaders and managers in the ISE must make responsible information sharing a priority for their respective organizations and educate and incentivize their workforces. Training, awards, and personnel performance and appraisal incentives are powerful tools.
Organizational cultures across the ISE vary widely, and information sharing is not always viewed as required behavior. To promote a shared awareness of the ISE and encourage such behavior, the PM-ISE issued the ISE Core Awareness Training Course to Federal departments and agencies and ISE-G-104: ISE Policy Mandating Core Awareness Training across ISE Mission Partners. The course is intended to give a common understanding of the ISE to all employees who support the counterterrorism mission. This training, coupled with continued efforts to include information sharing as a formal evaluation factor in personnel performance reports and agency incentive programs, is designed to help move the traditional “need to know” culture to one based on a “responsibility to provide.”
There are many examples of training resources that support the ISE. One is the US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance's, Global Information Sharing Toolkit (GIST). This toolkit is a resource library of guides and training available to federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement and can be found at the DoJ Justice Information Sharing GSIT website.
Many agencies offer awards for excellence in information sharing. The National Fusion Center Association offers a variety of awards for excellence, to include: Infrastructure Protection, Analysis, Outreach, outstanding performance by representatives and the federal and state and major urban area levels, Fusion Center of the Year and a Lifetime Achievement Award. DoD offers a Secure Information Sharing Award. Check with your agency to understand incentives to promote information sharing. In austere budget times, it is important for agencies to also be creative about the use of non-monetary awards to sustain and promote excellence in information sharing.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the PM-ISE have issued guidance to assist ISE agencies in the development of information sharing priority elements for inclusion in employee performance appraisals: ISE-G-105: Guidance on Integrating Information Sharing Responsibilities into Employee Performance Assessment, ISE Guidance for the Inclusion of Information Sharing Performance Evaluation Element in Employee Performance Appraisal Memorandum, September 23, 2008; and OPM Guidance for Inclusion of Information Sharing Performance Evaluation Element in Employee Performance Appraisal Memorandum, September 24, 2008.
PM-ISE supports rapid-transition projects, developed in conjunction with interagency stakeholders and end-users that have the potential to improve information sharing and safeguarding. These pilots are not research activities, but rather are well defined, limited projects with clear outputs and manageable milestones. ISE stakeholders are required to dedicate resources, which can but do not necessarily include funding. These projects are typically one to two year efforts designed to deliver a prototype capability that supports the ISE community and advances the goals of the National Strategy. The goal of ISE pilots is to deliver field-tested prototype capabilities to stakeholder organizations that have agreed to transition, operate, and maintain them.
For more information, contact PM-ISE’s Management and Oversight Division at ISE.gov/contact.
The following example illustrates the benefits of using the tools and processes described above to communicate with target ISE audiences.
The degree to which private sector outreach programs are implemented across the National Network of Fusion Centers (National Network) varies widely and is largely dependent upon the available resources and relative value each fusion center places on sharing information with the private sector. The PM-ISE supports its ISE partners in their efforts to develop a sustainable model for promoting greater engagement and sustained connectivity between private sector executives and the National Network.
The DHS State and Local Program Office, the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis, the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate, and the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), recognize the importance of building partnership models that integrate the protection and resiliency of private sector critical infrastructure into the National Network of Fusion Center’s Critical Operating Capabilities. DHS has worked with its NFCA partners to develop a number of resources that support the integration of this mission capability, including the Infrastructure Protection Field Resource Toolkit.
Fusion centers are uniquely situated to empower front-line law enforcement, public safety, fire service, emergency response, public health, critical infrastructure protection, and private sector security personnel to understand local implications of national intelligence, thus enabling local officials to better protect their communities. Recognizing the importance of this valuable partnership, a number of fusion centers across the national network are exploring ways to enhance their leverage of private sector capabilities and expertise and expand their reach within their area of responsibility (AOR). A number of fusion centers are integrating private sector analysts within the fusion center to enhance their analytic capabilities and provide a direct conduit to key stakeholders within their AORs; Fusion centers are exploring ways to utilize the National Council of Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to expand the depth and breadth of their information sharing with the private sector; and the NFCA has established a working group dedicated to collecting and promoting the sharing of tools and best practices for private sector outreach by fusion centers across the national network.
Go to the next section: 5 Call to Action
[2] Evaluation of the Existing Public-Private Partnership Model. DHS Integrated Task Force. July 12, 2013. Pages 4-6.