The Future of Information Activities

For those of you in my professional world, I’ve been doing a fairly deep dive into “Measures of Effectiveness” for the past few weeks.

This has led to the discovery of some incredible tools that do semantic analysis and sentiment analysis, some in foreign languages. Some of the tools are mature, others are not.  Yet others are initial efforts and are extremely limited.  The demonstrations set up for me were awe-inspiring, but one must understand the capabilities, limitations and history behind these tools to make sense, beyond the bells and whistles.

I witnessed US chaotic attempts to do MOE in the war in Iraq, then concerted efforts to use human-intensive efforts, then nascent attempts to use technology and humans together, now I’m finally seeing successful technology-pure attempts.

I’ve been doing this on behalf of the ‘information activities’ community in the US, as well as for the EU and NATO.

Yesterday I met with the person at USAID trying to measure the effectiveness of US aid being given to those in need around the world. The similarity of our efforts, one using information and one using aid, is striking. I have much to learn.

Now just imagine if information, aid, diplomacy, military and economics were coordinated, synchronized, integrated? Wow. Alas, with our political situation, not only in the US, this is not possible. I am the world’s biggest altruist in this field, but also a realist when it comes to politics.

Taking this one step further, imagine if GEN Mattis had not written his August 8, 2008 memo or changed what he wrote to say ‘We will continue to study Effects Based Operations, especially the human psyche, until we understand cause and effects and can properly build computer models accounting for all the variables’.  I recently stumbled across a US Army TRADOC effort to do this, now to explore further.

The USAID rep and I both agree that a mature model will be possible between 5 to 15 years from now.  But the tool I saw the other day can get at least one part of the equation to a point where it is workable.

To predict the future one must understand the past.

On a personal note: thank you, thank you all. Thank you for all your notes, sharing your insight and ‘reading me on’ to developments in our field.