The ISE Management Plan provides tools and info that can help agencies and organizations responsibly share information.
Our national security depends on our ability to responsibly share the right information, with the right people, at the right time.
As President, I have no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the United States and the American people. Meeting this responsibility requires the closest possible cooperation among our intelligence, military, diplomatic, homeland security, law enforcement, and public health communities, as well as with our partners at the State and local level and in the private sector. This cooperation, in turn, demands the timely and effective sharing of intelligence and information about threats to our Nation with those who need it, from the President to the police officer on the street.
President Barack Obama
National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding,
December 2012
The idea of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) originated in the 9/11 Commission Report and was mandated in §1016 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), as amended. The Act required the President to create a distributed and decentralized Information Sharing Environment (ISE) to facilitate the sharing of terrorism information in a manner consistent with national security and with applicable legal standards relating to privacy and civil liberties; and to designate a Program Manager responsible for planning for, overseeing the development of, and managing the ISE. The creation of the Office of the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) and the history of the ISE are detailed chronologically in PM-ISE’s Facebook timeline, with links available to relevant documents on ise.gov.
Our nation continues to face significant challenges in analyzing and disseminating terrorism, WMD, and homeland security related information. Today, ISE partners are primarily focused on implementing the National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding (National Strategy), released in December 2012. We use its three principles: 1) information is a national asset, 2) information sharing and safeguarding requires shared risk management, and 3) information informs decision-making to guide our actions. The scope of the National Strategy is not limited to terrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction information, but has grown to encompass public safety and security mission areas. ISE solutions, processes, best practices, and tools are being reused and extended to help realize the vision of the IRTPA and the National Strategy.
The purpose of this ISE Management Plan (Management Plan) is to provide common business processes and tools to enable collaboration among ISE stakeholders, which include federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, private sector, and international partners. The goal is to unify efforts across government to advance the implementation of an environment that facilitates information sharing among partners, governs a complex set of stakeholders, advances standards and uniform policies and procedures, and enables interoperability across many networks and systems.
This Management Plan is a resource for ISE stakeholders at all levels of government and the private sector, from chief information officers (CIOs) to program managers. The tools serve to provide guidance, directives, processes, practices, tools, and illustrative use cases to help them:
In addition to IRTPA §1016 and the National Strategy, further Executive Branch guidance on the ISE is provided in the following documentation:
A good resource to trace the evolution of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE) in the context of information sharing reforms and goals for the future of responsible information sharing is A Brief History of the ISE. A comprehensive list of guidance and directives can be accessed in our document library online.
This document has four sections that provide details on the common processes and tools available to help you achieve your information sharing and safeguarding goals as a part of the ISE:
Each section describes the specific steps to take and the resources available to help reach your responsible information sharing goals. Throughout the document, examples illustrate how partners are participating in and benefiting from the ISE’s processes and tools. The ISE Building Blocks, a knowledge management tool available on ise.gov, is an important companion to this management plan and is organized in a similar manner. It contains many important toolkits, lessons learned, successes, and best practices from our partners who are building their responsible information sharing programs.
The vision of the National Strategy will be achieved only through maturing our collective ability to use shared and common solutions, tools, and processes. PM-ISE assesses maturity using the ISE performance management framework, which aligns the goals in the National Strategy to ISE implementation guidance and measures of performance. The annual ISE performance assessment questionnaire, sent to and completed by ISE Stakeholders, provides the basis for PM-ISE to make this assessment. In addition to being aligned to the goals of the National Strategy, each question is also aligned to one or more of the following capability areas: community, process, and/or technology. Responses allow PM-ISE to measure how the ISE, as a whole, is progressing within each area.
PM-ISE will also develop new performance questions, when needed, for use in future ISE Performance Assessment Questionnaires. The appendix describes the capability areas against a spectrum of maturity and includes notional performance assessment questions that can be used by ISE Stakeholders to self-assess their maturity level.
ISE Stakeholders’ responses to the 2013 performance assessment questionnaire and PM-ISE’s assessment of maturity by capability area can be found in Appendix A of the 2013 ISE Annual Report to the Congress.
Go to the next section: 1 Governance and Policy
[1] Programmatic Guidance is issued only when significant program changes are expected of federal agencies.