Chief Learning Officer - January 2009 - (Page 27) F ollowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it became axiomatic to many U.S. government policymakers that the attacks “changed everything.” The thinking went that the very nature of these actions fundamentally altered the existing legal, political and military frameworks around war, diplomacy and foreign policy. More than seven years after the fact, there is a great deal of disagreement, both within the United States and overseas, about how many of and to what extent these things actually changed. However, Sept. 11 indisputably revolutionized the overall strategy and operations of one organization in particular: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Prior to Sept. 11, DIA had operated as a longterm strategic intelligence outfit within the U.S. Department of Defense. More than 80 percent of staff worked in or near Washington, D.C., and primarily conducted research and crafted studies that could take years to produce. In the months following the attacks, though, DIA became a more tactile, tactical organization, with a much greater emphasis on activities that supported battlefield operations. As a result, about 60 percent of DIA’s workforce is now based outside of the Washington area, spread out across between 150 and 200 locations worldwide. “This changed the rhythm on how work was done: If your projects are typically delivered five years out, as opposed to five hours out, that means big changes to processes and the way things work,” said Matt Peters, chief of DIA’s office of learning and development. “As all that has occurred, DIA has picked up a lot of different responsibilities for leading special intelligence areas within the Department of Defense: analysis and some things that go across other agencies.” Peters has presided over the learning function in DIA throughout much of this transition. In fact, he was initially attracted to the organization because of the major changes it was going through, not only in terms of workflows, but also the makeup of its employee population. “One of the things that attracted me to DIA was the fact that they recognized they really had to make some changes to have a deployable, worldwide workforce,” he said. “The workforce they had at the time was relatively senior, but they knew things had to change. We’ve been doing massive amounts of hiring over the past five years. About half of the people in our organization weren’t there five years ago. We’ve had that much growth.” One of the first major changes senior leaders instituted was the consolidation and centralization of various human capital processes and programs, Peters said. “At the time, they established a human capital DID YOU KNOW? director. This was before Matt Peters also serves as the my time. Each of the president of the International Society major units within the for Performance Improvement. DIA — there are probably between 14 and 20 structured within the organization — had their own personnel systems, training interests, career development and all the other human capital pieces. They established this central human capital structure, and I’m now the chief learning officer working within that. A lot of the programs are pretty new, implemented in the past two or three years.” As with any organizational restructuring, the progression hasn’t always been smooth. Bringing together all of these formerly independent training elements requires patience, establishment of trust and careful management of partnerships. “All of that takes time,” Peters said. “The organization you’re working with has to be used to that way of doing things, as well. In the past, it didn’t always work that way. In the intelligence community itself — and this was one of the lessons learned from 9/11 — the organizations were too stovepiped. They weren’t collaborating enough. That approach cascaded into all the intelligence organizations. DIA was the same way.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Peters and his team received occasional pushback on new projects. For instance, he Chief Learning Officer • January 2009 • www.clomedia.com 27 http://www.clomedia.com
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