In the past few months, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has made substantial progress in defining priority missions, improving management processes, and determining the best structure for I&A to meet its priorities, Bart Johnson, DHS’s acting under secretary for intelligence and analysis told the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment late last week at a hearing titled I&A Reconceived: Defining a Homeland Security Intelligence Role.

Johnson reviewed some of the key initiatives and reforms underway in four different areas for which I&A has major responsibility, including DHS’s State and Local Fusion Center program, analysis processes, management practices, and the new plans, policy, and performance management element charged with streamlining I&A processes and operations.

Fusion centers are and will continue to be the critical delivery vehicle for strengthening the sharing and dissemination of useful intelligence and information between the federal government and our state, local, tribal and private sector partners, according to Johnson.

Central to supporting such a state and urban area intelligence platform, Johnson said, was the establishment of a new Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office (JFC PMO).

The JFC PMO, Johnson said, will lead a unified department wide effort to develop and implement survey tools to ensure state, local and tribal customers are provided the opportunity to define and identify the types of homeland security-related information they need, and the format in which they need it. It will also develop mechanisms, in coordination with federal, state, local, tribal and territorial authorities, to improve the capability of state and major urban area fusion centers to gather, assess, analyze and share locally generated and national information and intelligence, in order to provide complete pictures of regional and national threats and trends.

After a comprehensive evaluation of I&A's analytic capabilities and functions, Johnson explained, the office also “determined that I&A needed to strategically realign its analytic and production resources and efforts more tightly with the priorities of the Secretary and the new National Intelligence Strategy.”

Accordingly, I&A's analysis and production resources, according to Johnson, will be prioritized to realign analytic resources to improve and expand support to the state, local and tribal consumer base.

Key to these plans, Johnson said, was the development of an analytic capability and methodology for assessing Suspicious Activity Reporting data, the creation of a centralized analysis group to meet the intelligence and information needs of the Secretary and Department components, including improved coordination and information sharing, and a strengthening of collaboration and consultation with other producers of intelligence and information products.

To this end, said Johnson, the Office of I&A will emphasize collaboration with interagency partners in some areas, including coordination with the FBI on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the National Counterterrorism Center and other federal agencies for substantive reporting on violent radicalization and domestic terrorism,and the DHS Office of Health Affairs, and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on pandemic threats.

Johnson also announced that I&A would be realigning disparate activities that were previously dispersed throughout the office under the leadership of a new Deputy Under Secretary for Plans, Policy and Performance Management (PPPM).

“The establishment of PPPM,” he said, “ demonstrates I&A's commitment to developing and implementing fair, transparent and collaborative decision making processes, rationalizing resource allocation to priority missions, and assessing whether investments are leading to preferred outcomes.”

This new I&A element, he added, will enable more streamlined and integrated strategic planning, programming, and budgeting life cycle processes, and further the Department's intelligence mission by providing Intelligence Enterprise (IE)-wide management guidance.

PPPM's responsibilities will include developing and unifying applicable strategies, plans and policies leading to an integrated DHS IE focused on its mission and its customers. The new PPPM will also be responsible for developing a detailed I&A strategic action plan that will include a mapping of all organizational activities and performance management metrics to measure program execution and effectiveness.

Johnson closed by saying that his office would be completing its first ever strategic action plan, which he called “a crucial step toward strengthening the strategic alignment of I&A activities” by the end of 2009.