The Marketing Consigliere likes to take examples from our nation’s honored warriors and apply them to business and marketing problems.  He also wants to recognize things which can be publicized from the impressive United States Intelligence Community that are relevant to Network-Centric Marketers.

Yesterday, the Adobe Intelligence Community Executive Forum, sponsored by Adobe and Carahsoft Technology Corporation, a Washington, DC based government IT solutions provider, was held with a gathering of over one hundred professionals from Federal agencies and contractors.  Bob Gourley, CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a well-respected security technology consulting and program management firm, served as a panel moderator for some very good talks on what Federal agencies were doing with regard to collaboration, information sharing, and Web 2.0.

The Keynote Speaker, John E. Hale of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES), enlightened the audience with ODNI’s embracing of technologies that help his internal customers accomplish their missions.  He and his team help enable the Intelligence Community by giving them many of the capabilities that the private sector is trying to give its people, albeit in an extremely secure computing environment.

They have a wiki for user generated content known as Intellipedia, which in less than three years has grown into “the” repository of information that allows authorized intelligence employeess to create, edit, and have dialogue on content in a way that was previously impossible due to physical and logical silos of data.  Datawarehousing and security remain top priorities, but within the confines of their closed networks.  They allow IMs, del.icio.us type bookmarking, self-service hosting, and blogging, using WordPress MU.  There is also the capabilities for mashups, tagging, and user profiles stating interests.  Of course, there is document sharing including terabytes worth of documents, images, and video.

All this and more to be better able to “connect the dots” for the safety of all Americans.   Let’s hope more leaders in the private sector take a cue from the Intelligence Community and empower their employees to internally use social network technologies to better gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon data.