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Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- Last week, a member of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks put CIA Director George Tenet on notice that massive structural change is on the way for the U.S. intelligence community and that when it's finished, the CIA hierarchy may look more like General Electric Co.'s than a typical spy agency's.
Former Navy Secretary John F. Lehman told Tenet during an April 14 hearing that the U.S. intelligence community faces "an IT problem" stemming from a "deep, embedded, functional [lack] throughout the community of common protocols for information."
One of the steps the commission may take to fix that problem, said Lehman, is to force the CIA and other agencies to adopt the GE corporate model, which is based on a small, centralized senior management team that's surrounded by IT-enabled functional departments. "[That] is the model that is beginning to take shape in our mind," he said.
Although the comparison between one of the world's largest multinational companies and the U.S. intelligence community -- a hodgepodge of dozens of federal agencies that operate more or less independently -- may seem strange to some, Tenet welcomed the idea.
"It's a good model," said Tenet, adding that having smaller staffs gives executives more power over execution. "[Having] real metrics and power to move people and data as you need to to achieve better execution is a smart way to think about this discipline for the future."
Hank Zupnick, CIO of GE subsidiary GE Capital Real Estate in Stamford, Conn., said the success of the company's culture stems from the fact that technologists are employed as strategic business drivers.

CIA Director George Tenet Image Credit: Dan Verton

"As a CIO at GE, I'm here to be a business manager, to help our business grow and profit, not only to manage technology," Zupnick said. He also noted that all IT projects are subject to Six Sigma quality standards and continual reviews by senior business managers to ensure that IT is still relevant to the changing needs of the business.
A Strategic Role for IT
Rob Enderle, principal analyst at The Enderle Group in San Jose, said studies of GE's IT management have shown that the IT group plays a strategic role in the company, with the CIO reporting directly to the CEO.
"They created effective synergies that reduced overall cost and allowed one group to benefit from the work of other groups," said Enderle. However, he added that while GE's strategic use of IT was the result of a