- Info
reorganization (1981),
| | | | | | Reorganization |
| | | | | | |
| that they must develop and adapt, were now open to the charge that they spent too much time "playing with the numbers." | | | In addition to greater training and new ADP features, four areas come to mind as increased costs of doing business in the new DI: more people; more recruiting; more space; and more time invested in meetings. On people, once you undertake to do multidisciplinary work on any country, the requirement for specialists from various disciplines rises. In the economic area, for example, there are today twice as many economists working on sub-Saharan Africa as there were before 1981, and they are still stretched thin. The difference is that, before the reorganization, OER moved people around much more from country assignment to country assignment as particular narrowly focused economic issues arose. |
| | |
| Certainly in the case of the economists, the costs of career development for the DI became increasingly explicit over the 1980s. What formerly took place as an exchange between a branch chief and an analyst now became sets of courses and workshops and career counseling across organization boundaries. It became increasingly difficult in a DI office for a new economist to know what training was important to developing the skills most needed on the job. And the rewards that had accrued to same-discipline managers who tutored and developed people proved harder to specify and implement as bureaucratic boundaries intervened. | |
| | | |
| | Similarly, military analysts did not have to have a deep knowledge of the countries they worked on. In a brief stint as a division chief in late 1981, I inherited from the old Office of Strategic Research the lion's share of military analysts doing research on the Third World. They constituted a small branch. Considering their numbers, they would have drowned in a task like tracking the Persian Gulf crisis. |
| | | |
| A partial correction to these problems was the outcome of two PES studies undertaken in 1989 and 1990. One study looked at the product of and conditions for economic analysis in the DI, and the other was a similar study on military analysis. One outcome of the studies was the appointment of senior military and economic referents to help on issues of professional communication and career development for these two groups of analysts throughout the DI. So far, this approach seems to have achieved a better transmission of relevant information than had been true before. | |
| | | |
| | Recruiting is, of course, the other face of having more people. Recruiting activity blossomed in the 1980s for two reasons. The accounts we covered grew in number and complexity, and this required more people in the pipeline. As the population of people outside the Agency who fit well the changing nature of the DI jobs tended to decrease, recruiting became somewhat more difficult and increasingly demanded a fairly heavy effort of DI people in concert with Office of Personnel recruiters. As we face reductions over the next several years, the need for large numbers of applicants will decline. But the sustained high effort to find the right people will not. |
| | |
| Resource Costs. In some areas, it is hard to sort out how much of the increased resource commitments for analysis related to new demands rather than the increased expense of doing business in the new configuration. In others it is not. Either way, there were some resource tendencies that we need to be aware of as we look forward. | |
| | | |
| | | | There is also a strong correlation between people and space. If we had needed a clear sign that space would be a problem, it came swiftly. The departure of the former Office of Soviet Analysis from the Headquarters compound was the first salvo, but others were to come as we searched for places to house the new centers in the mid-1980s. The pressure of space issues was heavily driven by increased automation of information processing, an enhanced capability which was critical to dealing with more and more complex policymakers' questions. |
| In thinking about resource costs, it is important to remember that DCI Casey increased the size of the Agency and the territory in which it operated. Thus, it is equally hard to distinguish accurately or in any net sense between new things we did because we thought they would be helpful and new things we did because the customer demanded them. (Showing that we can do one new thing on our own often stimulates outside interest in having us do several others that are related.) | | |
| | | | | | |
| | | | 38 | | |
Posted: May 08, 2007 08:48 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:48 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:48 AM
