The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is preparing to release a data reference architecture for the intelligence community (IC) in the next week or so, according to the IC Chief Data Officer (CDO) Lori Wade.
Wade, who is housed within ODNI, said that the coming data reference architecture will help all 18 elements of the intelligence community get its data AI-ready.
“We’re about to sign it out, hopefully in the next week or two … we have a data reference architecture that we have developed with the 18 elements. It’s a CDO and a [chief information officer (CIO)] document and architecture that I’ll be signing out with the intelligence community CIO,” Wade said on Thursday at Cloudera and AWS’s Summit, Accelerate AI with Trusted Data.
“That will show how we’re going to automate all of this and look at how we break down data silos. It’s based on data mesh principles across a distributed ecosystem,” she added.
Wade said the data reference architecture and document will be a public release. The IC has already shared it with its public sector partners.
She explained that the public release follows suit with the public release of both the IC’s data strategy – which it released in July 2023 – and the Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 504 – which it released in June 2024.
“Everything we’ve done … is unclassified,” Wade said. “The data reference architecture will be unclassified because in the data strategy and in the National Intelligence Strategy, there’s a huge push toward that transparency and working with the private sector, our liaison partners, academic partners, all of those things that we have to have in place to be able to do that.”
Overall, Wade said her priority is “getting that scale and speed across the whole 18” when it comes to AI – which she said “is fueled by and requires quality data.”
“In the end, because we’re going across 18 elements, if one and one or two of them are very successful at deploying AI, that’s really not going to help the entirety of the IC, which is my focus,” Wade said. “The work that we do, it crosses boundaries, it crosses agencies, it crosses missions. We have to be building to that, and quickly.”
