The recent trials and tribulations of the U.S. intelligence community provide an extreme example of how culture can undermine competitiveness. The group of agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community—the CIA, NSA, DIA, and FBI among others—have billions of dollars in technology capability.

Some of the agencies, such as the NSA, employ some of the most advanced technologies, while others—the FBI—have been ineffective because of poorly designed and utilized IT systems. According to the GAO, the FBI has had five CIOs in the past 24 months and about the same number of chief IT architects.

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"Given the poor state of the FBI's information systems, field agents usually did not know what investigations in their own office, let alone in other field offices, were working on," said a report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States commission (also known as the 9-11 Commission), which was formed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The FBI has been unable to fully deploy its new, $458 billion Trilogy network and applications that supposedly lay a foundation for improved information sharing and analysis.

A 9-11 Commission staff statements also characterized the intelligence agencies as lacking in imagination and as having a bureaucratic culture more appropriate for the cold war. More importantly, the various three-letter agencies weren’t able to put the pieces of the puzzle together that might have the terrorist attacks.  Among the other criticisms leveled at the intelligence agencies by the 9-11 Commission were:

• They lacked a common information architecture that would help to ensure the integration of counterterrorism data across CIA, NSA, DIA, the FBI, and other agencies. 
• They lacked an institution or culture that provided a safe outlet for admitting errors and improving procedures.
• There were organizational restrictions on information sharing and misunderstandings regarding responsibility for information sharing. 
• In intelligence collection, despite many excellent efforts, there was not a comprehensive review of what the intelligence community knew, what it did not know, followed by the development of a community-wide plan to close those gaps.

These criticisms aimed at the intelligence community could be generalized and applied to almost any company. Often times the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Finger pointing, rather than accountability and clear roles and responsibilities, create a culture of mistrust. Employees from executives to factory floor workers aren’t able to obtain the right information at the right time to make effective decisions.

The constant chatter among businesses and the intelligence community about insufficient budgets, technology complexity and regulatory compliance is valid, but it masks the underlying failure to inculcate a culture that can overcome those problems with a clear and strategic focus on identifying the key business levers and extracting the relevant data. Without that focus, companies--and the intelligence community--are doomed to live in the past and have a very uncertain future.