Applicability of Army Design Methodology to the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI has a long history and established culture as the pre-eminent law enforcement agency in the world. Beginning in the late 1930s, the FBI assumed responsibility for espionage and domestic intelligence investigations. Abuses of domestic intelligence investigations in the 1950s and 1960s led to the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s. Those hearings showed the FBI had abused its investigative powers, and several senior FBI officials were indicted. Subsequently, intelligence investigations and programs were avoided by most FBI personnel, and the intelligence program was unable to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks. Following 9/11, the FBI sought to transform itself into an effective domestic intelligence agency by implementing a series of bureaucratic programs and policies. Eight years later, the Fort Hood attack, and the subsequent Congressional report, indicated the FBI's transformation needed to be accelerated. Had the concept of design been available to FBI Intelligence Program leaders and applied to the problem, the need to deal with the FBI's law enforcement culture concurrently with establishment of bureaucratic policies and procedures would have been apparent. By applying design to the Intelligence Program, a need for post-9/11 cultural transformation becomes clear. As the world becomes both more complex and interconnected, the FBI needs to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges. By developing and applying its own design concept, the FBI can avoid the transformational problems of the past ten years in the future. The FBI will continue to be faced with complex, ill-structured problems, and can benefit by establishing a design process to apply to those problems.