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It has been months since the last meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club. Well, it’s back — and with a book that I think will really get you to think. The book is titled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. The book is a fascinating analysis of what gets us actually carry out actions. More in just a moment, but first…

The details:
When: Friday, April 2 at 3p ET
Where: On Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris and on FederalNewsRadio.com
The book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. Amy and I will be there with Pink — and I’m working on some special guests to join the discussion.

Before I get to some details of the book, a reminder on the Federal News Radio Book Club:

This is something akin to the Oprah book club. You don’t have to be anywhere — we’ll hold the book club “meeting” right on the air on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris. In addition to the author, Daniel Pink, we will also have some experts in the government world so we can discuss how it touches how this market works. We invite your thoughts, questions and observations on the book — before, during and after.

The book Drive is about what motivates people. And I thought it was particularly intriguing given where the government market is with a relatively antiquated pay system. And I decided that this book was particularly relevant based on two significant developments in the past year:

First, the Office of Personnel Management is looking at revamping the government’s general schedule system, OPM Director John Berry has said.
Second, the failure of the Defense Department’s National Security Personnel System, a pay-for-performance system. I have been fascinated by NSPS because, it seemed to me, it offered some real learning opportunities for the federal government.

And that brings us to the book — Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink.

The crux of the argument in this book is that pay-for-performance systems simply don’t work all that well. It is essentially a carrot-and-stick approach, and there is ample evidence that the carrot-and-stick is actually ade-motivator. A caveat: These are for information age jobs. And he argues that there are better ways to motivate people.

Here is Pink’s synopsis from his Web site:

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He demonstrates that while carrots and sticks worked successfully in the twentieth century, that’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action. Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.

Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, which I also found fascinating. But this book seems particularly well timed.

So… I hope you’ll pick up the book and join in the conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book.

Previous Federal News Radio Book Club “meetings”:

* The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard. Read more and hear the book club meeting here.* Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, and John Butman. Read more and hear the book club “meeting” with Andrew and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra find a link to the book club session here.

This is a much belated post — you can thank the flu.

A few weeks ago, I got to moderate a panel at ACT/IAC’s Executive Leadership Conference 2009 on innovation. And we had a great group:

Turning Ideas into Value: The panel will discuss the process for generating ideas and how to select the best ones to maximize the benefits of innovation. Who do you look to for innovation? What are examples of creating the environment for innovative thinking? How to share ideas in nurturing an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity?

Panelists:

• Moderator: Chris Dorobek, Co-Anchor, Federal News Radio
• Sanjeev Bhagowalia, Chief Information Officer, Department of Interior
• Tom Freebairn, Acting Director, USA.gov Technologies, Office of Citizen Services, General Services Administration
• Mike Nelson, Visiting Professor, Internet Studies, Georgetown University
• Mike Seablom, Head, Software Integration and Visualization Office, Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

And one of the great things about conferences is people share good books — and there were a ton o’ books mentioned in this session. I promised that I would share the list. (I planned to do it earlier, but… the flu got in the way.)

If you heard books mentioned that I haven’t listed here, either send it along or post it here as a comment.

Of course, I mentioned a few books.

* Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Harvard Business School Prof. Andrew McAfee, which is slated to be released on Dec. 1 but seems like it is available now. Transparency notes: McAfee asked me to write a “blurb” for the book, so I got an early read. My blurb didn’t make the actual jacket of the book, but… he posted it. Regardless, it is a fascinating read — and it highlights the remarkable work done by the intelligence community’s Intellipedia suite of collaboration tools. Second transparency note: McAfee will be on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris on Dec. 1 — the official book launch day.

* If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government by William Eggers and John O’Leary — Again, I got a pre-read of this book and it is just delightful. And one of the issues Eggers and O’Leary deal with is innovation. And a programming note: Eggers and O’Leary will be on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris on Thursday, Nov. 19… LIVE

* The Pixar Touch by David A. Price — I hear what you are saying — what does a movie studio have to do with government? Well, there is a real connection. First off, the technology that creates those amazing movies is made possible by a grant from ARPA — now DARPA. And the Defense Department is still one of the largest users in the world of this technology. (Pixar, remember, started as a software company, not as a movie studio.) I used Pixar as an example of an organization that was literally built on innovation — innovation is built in. And Price does a wonderful job detailing that. Pixar has also been remarkably successful — all of their movies have more than exceeded the magic $100 million gross that marks a hit movie in Hollywood. That is pretty remarkable in and of itself.

* Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew… This book was actually highlighted by federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra — and we featured it on the Federal News Radio Book Club. Hear our book club conversation with Chopra, Andrew, Federal News Radio’s Francis Rose and myself here.

* What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis… This book was also part of the Federal News Radio Book Club. Hear the meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club here. The book, in the end, isn’t about Google. Rather, it is about innovation and being innovative. A lot of the book focuses on journalism, but…

Books mentioned by others:

* Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy by Judy Estrin mentioned by Nelson. We spoke to Estrin on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris soon after her book was released. Read more and hear our conversation here.

* Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology by Paul Glen, David H. Maister, and the legendary Warren G. Bennis, mentioned by Nelson

Did you hear any good book titles? I’d love to hear them.

Meanwhile, there is a great social networking site for bookies — people who love to read, not people who make bets. It’s called GoodReads.com. You can book friend me here.

As you may know, I love books… and I love reading… so I love seeing what other people are reading.

Along those lines, I’m always fascinated what other people are reading.

I read all sorts of things — I have often joked that I’m one of the few people who read magazines ranging from The New Yorker and The Economist to US Magazine. And my range of books is equally broad — and I’m often reading at least two books at a time. Currently, for example, I’m reading the Twilight vampire books as well as a book recommended by DOD deputy CIO Dave Winnergren and Navy CIO Robert Carey… Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James O’Toole, and Patricia Ward Biederman. (If I can get Bennis on the air, this might just be a Federal News Radio Book Club book.)

And yes — of course there is a social networking site for books — you can find me on Goodreads.com here… and on Shelfari here…

Anyway… Slate.com John Dickerson has a wonderful story about what’s on President Obama’s reading list. The White House issued the president’s vacation reading… and here it is…

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York’s Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

Dickerson goes on to analyze what this list tells us about the President.

The Obama selection is not overtly controversial. In 2006, Bush’s list included The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu. If Obama were reading that today while his White House was issuing a new report about the H1N1 virus, he’d start a national panic. But his list is also clearly not poll-tested. Women played a key role in Obama’s victory in 2008. They’re swing voters. And yet all of Obama’s authors are white men. The subject of the longest book, John Adams, is a dead white male. Obama couldn’t get away with that in an election year, and, given his aides’ penchant for cleaning up little things like this, we’ll soon see the president with a copy of Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women.

Read Dickerson’s full story here.

I can’t imagine having to poll test my reading list, but…

Two books coming out this fall that I’m very much looking forward to:

Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. I actually was given an early read of this one and McAfee, a associate professor at the Harvard Business School and the man credited with creating the term “enterprise 2.0.” As I mentioned previously, one of the examples discussed in the book is Intellipedia.

The other book that I’m really looking forward to is Deloitte’s William D. Eggers’ If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government. Read more about the book here.

Both books come out in November.

Yes — today is my birthday. (I have a friend who lies about his age. Frankly, I am trying out going the other way — Let’s be honest — I don’t look like I’m in my 30s, or if I did, it would be a hard 30 years. But I’m going the other way — while I’m 43 today, I look fantastic for a person in their 50s! Right?)

That aside… for my birthday, you’re getting the gifts.

First off, as I mentioned yesterday, through today, you can get the fourth Federal News Radio Book Club book Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard — for FREE. It is a PDF download from here.

Hear the fourth meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club here… and download the PDF of the book from here… and did I mention that it is FREE?

Secondly, today’s Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris featured a parade of stars. Among them…

* Ed DeSeve, a senior advisor to the Vice President for recovery implementation, who talks about the challenges getting the $787 billion stimulus package… He updates us on how much has been distributed so far… It’s a fascinating conversation.
* Robert Carey, the chief information officer for the Department of Navy and the first government CIO blogger, who talks about, among other things, the fact that they are updating their government first Web 2.0 policy, his views on cyber-security, and the role of the CIO — Carey is also speaking at Input next week, if you want to ask him a question for yourself…
* And Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager of Quest Government Services. She has been in Chicago for the past few days for the GSA Network Services conference — and much of the focus has been the transition — or lack of transition — to the Networx telecommunications contract.

It’s my birthday on Wednesday, but… here’s a gift for you…

Earlier this year, for Federal News Radio Book Club book number four, we discussed Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard… and Federal News Radio’s Francis Rose and I discussed the book Stallard and with Martha Dorris, GSA’s acting acting Associate Administrator Citizen Services and Communications. Read more and hear the book club meeting here.

Earlier today on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose, Stallard made a return visit to Federal News Radio. You can hear that conversation here. But he also announced that, for a short time, you can download Fired Up or Burned Out… for free. Just follow this link and you can download the book as a PDF. It’s only for a short time — through tomorrow — so… dowload away. [PDF]

Meanwhile, you can hear our conversation about Fired Up or Burned Out here.

Yes, I’ve been going on and on and on about the fifth meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club, talking about the book Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin. Joining us in Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s Studio 1-A was the author, Jim Andrew, and federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who was the one who suggested the book.

You can hear the full hour conversation from Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose here:

We’ve had some great discussions that have been part of the Federal News Radio Book Club — I have the list of them below — but I have heard from a number of people that they really enjoyed the conversation… and the book.

Again, I have to admit — I didn’t select this book. As I mentioned earlier, Chopra mentioned the book in his first interview with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller earlier this year. [Hear part one of Miller's interview with Chopra here, where he mentioned the book Payback... part two here.]

A few interesting points that came from the book and the discussion…

One is that there needs to be a focus on innovation, but it also can’t be merely the ‘throw it on the wall and see what sticks’ approach. There needs to be some return on the innovation investment — there needs to be payback.

The other was about the NO of innovation — inNOvation, as one person put it to me. I had several questions that were sent to me about this topic. Here is one:

Always harder to stop the investment; some can take several years and it runs up the price tag; then folks say just spend some more, it will work.

It’s a great question — when do you say when… at what point do you cry “uncle”?

There is a lot of interesting discussion around the topic of government failure. The fact is that failure happens. Frankly, if it doesn’t, an organization probably isn’t taking enough chances. Not everything works. And if change needs to be a part of an organization’s culture, then one has to assess the risk of failure. And enable a culture where failure can be tolerated — maybe embraced. No small task in government.

I’m going to re-listen to our conversation. I’d love to get your thoughts.

Meanwhile, I’m working on the next Federal News Radio Book Club selection. Suggestions always welcome.

Previous Federal News Radio Book Club “meetings”:

* The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard. Read more and hear the book club meeting here.

I have been going on and on and on about the fifth meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club. Well, tomorrow is the big day. The “meeting” of the book club comes up at 2p ET on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose show… and we are discussing the book Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, and John Butman. And I expect that both federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who selected the book in an interview with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller. (You can hear that interview from here)… and the author, Jim Andrew, will be here in Federal News Radio’s Studio 1-A.

For those of you who have never listened to one of our book club meetings before, these are something akin to the Obama book club — you participate by reading the book and sending along your questions. (Previous book club meetings are below.)

We like to keep this conversational… and here are some of the discussion topics:

* We’ll start talking about innovation. Chopra has made it part of his mantra. And Payback looks at how an organization can make innovation matter — and may it pay off.
* I’m going to ask Chopra to talk about some of the challenges with innovation in government
* Why does innovation end up being challenging?
* Why does innovation in government seem particularly challenging?
* The book largely focuses on the private sector. Do the lessons from the private sector work for the public sector?

If you have questions or comments about the book… or about innovation… you can offer up thoughts, comments, insights, questions, discussion topics… whatever you want to add to the discussion… You can do that here on the DorobekInsider… you can do that on the Payback book club meeting’s Facebook event page… on my Facebook page… you can do that through on my Twitter feed… or just an e-mail — cdorobek at chrisdorobek.com.

Previous Federal News Radio Book Club “meetings”:

* The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard. Read more and hear the book club meeting here.

For those of you who have never listened to one of our book club meetings before, these are something akin to the Obama book club — you participate by reading the book and sending along your questions. (Previous book club meetings are below.)

We like to keep this conversational… and here are some of the discussion topics:

* We’ll start talking about innovation. Chopra has made it part of his mantra. And Payback looks at how an organization can make innovation matter — and may it pay off.

* I’m going to ask Chopra to talk about some of the challenges with innovation in government

* Why does innovation end up being challenging?

* Why does innovation in government seem particularly challenging?

* The book largely focuses on the private sector. Do the lessons from the private sector work for the public sector?

If you have questions or comments about the book… or about innovation… you can offer up thoughts, comments, insights, questions, discussion topics… whatever you want to add to the discussion… You can do that here on the DorobekInsider… you can do that on the Payback book club meeting’s Facebook event page… on my Facebook page… you can do that through on my Twitter feed… or just an e-mail — cdorobek at chrisdorobek.com.

Previous Federal News Radio Book Club “meetings”:

* The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott. Read more and find a link to the book club session here.
* Fired Up or Burned Out: How to reignite your team’s passion, creativity, and productivity by Michael Lee Stallard. Read more and hear the book club meeting here.

I have been going on and on and on about the fifth meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club, where we will be discussing the book Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, and John Butman. And, as I have mentioned, this book was selected by federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra in an interview with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller. (You can hear that interview from here.)

Chopra was always going to be here in Federal News Radio’s studio 1-A on Friday, July 31 at 2p ET on In Depth with Francis Rose program… and, our course, Rose and myself will be there… But the author of the book, Jim Andrew, senior partner and managing director of Boston Consulting Group’s innovation group will also be joining us live — in studio.

Of course, if you want have questions or comments… you can do that here on the DorobekInsider… you can do that on the Payback book club meeting’s Facebook event page… on my Facebook page… you can do that through on my Twitter feed… or just an e-mail — cdorobek at chrisdorobek.com.

It should be a great discussion.

Just a reminder that we are a mere 8-days from the fifth meeting of the Federal News Radio Book Club — and it’s a good one.

Our book — Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, and John Butman — was selected by the new federal chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra — and Chopra will join us live in studio.

So first… the details:
When: Friday, July 31 at 2p ET
Where: On Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose program and on FederalNewsRadio.com
The book: Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, and John Butman — and James Andrew, Senior Partner & Managing Director of Boston Consulting Group’s innovation group will be joining us… so not a bad line-up: Chopra, Andrews and then Rose and Dorobek.

How did this come about: Well, Obama CTO Aneesh Chopra, in his interview with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller, mentioned the book. I have posted part one of the interview below:

You can hear part two here.

And finally… one last item because there may be some people who have never “attended” a Federal News Radio Book Club “meeting”: You don’t have to be anyplace other then near your radio. The Federal It is something akin to the Oprah book club except we talk about books that help feds do their jobs better. And perhaps unlike other book clubs, our “meetings” take place on the radio — specifically on on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose and online at FederalNewsRadio.com. And we’d love to hear your thoughts about these issues. Comments will soon be available here. I have also set up a Facebook event page for the book club.

If you’re reading the book, I’d love to get your thoughts, comments, insights, questions, discussion topics… whatever you want to add to the discussion… You can do that here on theDorobekInsider… you can do that on the Payback book club meeting’s Facebook event page… on my Facebook page… you can do that through on my Twitter feed… or just an e-mail — cdorobek at chrisdorobek.com.

The book is about… well, innovation, but innovation in a different way — how to turn innovation into something that benefits your organization — read: a payback. And the book argues that process is… a process. And there ways you can encourage it, and by implementing that process, you can benefit from your organization.

Given what has been going on with technology right now — and the need for innovation within agencies — the book is valuable.

I’ll be posting some of my take aways from the book over the next few days. I hope you will share yours as well.

And I look forward to the discussion Friday, July 31 on Federal News Radio 1500 AM’s In Depth with Francis Rose.

Editor’s note: This item is re-posted from earlier this week. Unfortunately, for some reason, the item has just disappeared. Federal News Radio’s tech team is working on it, but… it is one of my favorite posts — so I am just re-posting it.

When the history of government 2.0 is written, the intelligence community will get several chapters. In fact, I’m finishing up a pre-publish copy Harvard Business School Prof. Andrew McAfee‘s wonderful book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (set for November release – although there is an active effort to move up the publication date). Anyway, in McAfee’s book, Intellipedia ends up being one of his four enterprise 2.0 case studies — right up there with a case from Google.

First off, a definition for people who don’t know what Intellipedia — or even a wiki — is. Wikis are Web sites designed for collaboration where groups can come together to collect and edit data. Of course, the best known wiki is the enormously successful Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia that taps into the wisdom of crowds. Intellipedia started out as a Wikipedia-like wiki for the intelligence community. And Intellipedia has evolved into a suite of Web. 20 tools for the intelligence community — the Intellipedia wiki, which uses the free, Wikimedia software; a photo sharing tool akin to Flickr; a social bookmarking tool akin to Delicious (my Delicious bookmarks)… and on and on…

In so many ways, this remarkable suite of tools has been at the cutting edge of the transformation of how government uses information. Not only is Intellipedia significantly ahead of most government agencies — therefore they are often requested for speaking posts — but I would argue that the intelligence community is well ahead of many private sector organizations.

And one cannot discount the challenges facing the intelligence community. One just has to go back and read the 9/11 Commission’s final report as a reminder, as McAfee recounts in his book: The 9/11 Commission’s “conclusions can be summarized using two phrases that became popular during the investigations: even though the system was blinking red before 9/11, no one could connect the dots.” (If you either have never read the 9/11 Commission’s report or it has been awhile, it is a remarkable piece of work — almost chilling… and a surprisingly readable narative of what happened. And owners of the Amazon Kindle, you can get it for only 99-cents.)

The goal was to create tools that enable dot connecting — that make data visable and more usable. The goal is share data — and, by extension, knowledge — across the traditional and very well established boundaries in the intelligence community.

In Intellipedia team has recently posted a video that describes what this is all about much better then I could.

So out of the mistakes of 9/11… and out of the 9/11 Commission report… developed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to bring the myriad of intelligence organizations.

There were undoubetedly the organizational and systemic changes, but what also started happening was — to put it simply — stuff. Among the stuff were these tools — and they developed both with some top-down help, but they also evolved organically.

As I mentioned, Intellipedia is way ahead of just about everybody else. So they are fascinating to watch develop because they are facing issues that most organizations will face in the coming years.

Last year, GCN’s Joab Jackson wrote a much discussed story provocatively titled Intellipedia suffers midlife crisis. And Intellipedia is at an interesting place at its evolution. (When the GCN story can out, I thought the headline was preposterous — after all, these tools have been around for a few years. My sense is the baby is barely walking. Yet the headline was more provocative then accurate — but it ended up spurring a very good discussion around standardization. The question at the heart of the argument is: Should these tools eventually be required use within organisations?)

One of the tools is A-Space. The more formal definition of A-Space is “a common collaborative workspace for all analysts from the USIC. That is accessible from common workstations and provides unprecedented access to interagency databases, a capability to search classified and unclassified sources simultaneously, web-based messaging, and collaboration tools.” Think of it more as a Facebook for the intel community. (Read more about A-Space in FCW… Information Week… even CNN… and a post from Lewis Shepherd, who was chief of the innovation directorate of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and is now with Microsoft.

It is a fascinating way of trying to share information.

The Defense Intelligence Agency recently commissioned a study assessing A-Space. The study, conducted by Nancy Dixon, a knowledge management expert, has recently been completed and the report is fascinating. Dixon blogs the conclusions and links to the full report [PDF]. I have also posted it below.

In short, A-Space shows real promise.

I’ll just provide bullet items of her conclusions, because you can read more detail about them for yourself in her report, but… I will quote the top one:

• A-Space Creates a Collaborative Culture that Serves as a Model for Collaboration

The most significant feature of A-Space is the open, collaborative, and appreciative culture that is developing. Through the on-line interaction, counterparts in agencies are coming to know each other as valued colleagues. The willingness to help others on A-Space is evident everywhere. The informality of the language and the friendly banter create the feel of a comfortable conversation among peers. There is a growing sense of trust that makes it acceptable to offer to one’s thinking even when it is not completely formed. As A-Space numbers grow, it has the potential to make the interagency collaboration that is so needed, a reality. It is this culture of trust along with the functionality of A-Space and the classification level, which supports the analytic benefits that are accruing through analysts’ interaction on A-Space, and could be a model of collaboration for any occupational skill in any venue.

The others:

• A-Space Classification Level Provides Access to Long Obscured Documents
• A-Space Functionality Promotes Networking Across Organizational Boundaries
• A-Space Enhances Users Situational Awareness
• A-Space Allows Users to Augment their Ability to Interpret Information
• Analysts use A-Space to Test Ideas and Theories Early in the Knowledge Creation
• Process

Also be sure to read the challenges… and the recommendations. It is a fascinating study.