About a week ago I was pleasantly surprised to come across a Java application that lets a person construct a ACH (Analysis of Competing Hypotheses) matrix. The application is called ACH0. That's actually a zero (0). What is ACH? The CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence describes it as "...a tool to aid judgment on important issues requiring careful weighing of alternative explanations or conclusions. It helps an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve. " A week later the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)posted a PDF document titled: "Assisting People to Become Independent Learners in the Analysis of Intelligence" by Peter L. Pirolli, Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., Final Report to the Office of Naval Research, February 2006. It seems the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is also working on a collaborative version of the same software called CACHE. A NIST study found that "analysts were confident that ACH would help improve the thoroughness of analysis, the method was easy to learn and use, and they were inclined to use the method in future work. I was also suprised to read that "face-to-face interaction frequently yeilds biased information foraging because there is a tendency to focus on evidence and hypotheses held in common". Hmmm. That sounds like OSINT analysts, working remotely/virtually, may well produce better intelligence (or at least intelligence devoid of biased information foraging). Maybe the "first responder" analysts should be of the OSINT variety? Once an understanding or scenario is better developed, the ACH matrix could be passed to the "second responders (all-source analyst?)" who can augment it with secret data.More importantly, what do you think?
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