Learn how the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) turned to Oracle to help tackle its central task — to gather and share highly sensitive information across agencies. The article includes: The steps DHS leadership took to define its mission — and develop a culture of collaboration. Oracle's role in configuring a database solution that brings together federal, state, and local officials as well as the academic community. How critical need to surface information based on reliability and relevance. A snapshot of the Oracle products involved.

As Published In May 2004

Mission-Critical Collaboration
By Aaron Lazenby

Oracle builds a database for homeland security.

Effective sharing of information has never been more critical than it is for the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was established in 2002—a year after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.—and tasked with protecting the United States from future harm. The agency, made up of 22 organizations, including such divisions as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, and the newly created Transportation Security Administration, faced a formidable challenge. With no significant history of its component entities working well together, the new department needed to learn quickly how to organize all of its resources around its charter—and information sharing was to play a major role.

Jim Flyzik, deputy CIO at the White House Office of Homeland Security and senior adviser to then-Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, says this marks a huge shift in the federal government's culture. "To grossly simplify, homeland security is all about information sharing and finding ways for the federal government to share information among its agencies," says Flyzik. "We are moving from a culture of 'need to know' to a culture of 'need to share.'"

Collaboration Inspiration

That "need to share" is no small task for the DHS, the result of the largest restructuring of the U.S. government since the New Deal. But Oracle's recent work on a homeland security collaboration system with the Center for the Study of the Presidency (CSP), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, shows how government, policy experts, and the high-tech industry can work together to address the challenges of homeland security. "Managing information that supports national security is one of the most important missions that we have," says Tim Hoechst, Oracle senior vice president of technology and manager of the project.

From the time Ridge was appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, he has moved rapidly to create a culture of collaboration in the new department, enlisting the help of officials inside and outside the administration to begin a process that is essential to the protection of the U.S. The CSP, a policy organization dedicated to serving as a central resource on issues affecting the modern presidency and its related institutions, has earned a reputation as a nonpartisan clearinghouse of high-level policy analysis. Armed with a long-standing commitment to the study of national security, senior members of the CSP's staff were asked by Secretary Ridge to serve as advisers.

Roughly every two months, the CSP invites homeland security experts to take part in a roundtable session with Secretary Ridge and his staff. The meetings tackle a range of national security topics—from bioterrorism to crisis communication—with leading policy specialists commenting on new research and sharing their opinions with department officials.

When at one of these sessions Secretary Ridge asked for a summary of the topics and recommendations the group had discussed, the brains at the CSP were inspired to create a more active—an internet-based—way of collecting these ideas. "In a sense, what he recommended doing was taking the roundtable and making it virtual," says Jonah Czerwinski, senior research associate with the CSP and manager of the roundtable series.

Rallying the Troops

Officials at the CSP saw an opportunity to bring together the best minds in homeland security to share expertise with the decision makers in Washington, namely, the leadership of the DHS and leadership in other parts of the executive branch. What they imagined was the Homeland Security Database, a repository for major pieces of homeland security policy analysis. The CSP engaged Oracle to help it build such a system, which would allow experts to upload reports they have published to share with a select group of subscribers, including officials at DHS; other federal agencies involved in homeland security; members of congress, state and local officials; and academics.

Snapshot The following Oracle technologies were used in the creation of the CSP's Homeland Security Database: Oracle HTML DB is a development tool for quick deployment of an application whose main purpose is to query a database and display the results in a Web browser. HTML DB accelerates application development through built-in design themes, navigational controls, form handlers, and reports. Oracle Text uses standard SQL to index, search, and analyze text and documents stored in the Oracle database, in files, and on the Web. Oracle Database is used by businesses for its performance, reliability, and security. Designed for enterprises of all types, Oracle Database offers businesses fast, simple installation and extensive self-management in addition to advanced features such as clustering.

With so much information of varying quality available on the subject, the Homeland Security Database needed to be designed to make the best analysis available to decision makers through a logical, user-friendly interface. The Oracle team that had developed a product called HTML DB was enlisted to build the Homeland Security Database. Leveraging the technology available in Oracle9i Database and a media-management tool called Oracle Text, Oracle was able to deliver a working prototype to the CSP in two weeks. Staff members at the CSP were so pleased with the results that they began to imagine other possibilities for the system.

"When Secretary Ridge said, 'There's no reason why we can't continue to share ideas this way,' it occurred to us that maybe this database could do more than just make information available," says Czerwinski. "It could also generate ideas; it could connect people who don't ordinarily have the opportunity to communicate. It could really offer an avenue of communication, a two-way street between the policy communities, the private sector, the academic and research communities, and the homeland security leadership in the executive branch."

Extending the Network

Two weeks later, the Oracle team returned with additional functionality that would allow contributors to interact with each other and the documents published in the system. With the addition of this chat functionality, the system became much more than a database—it evolved into a platform for collaboration among the top security minds in the U.S. Analysts and academics could submit research for review by experts from a range of related fields. Legislators could propose directions for legislation and enlist the opinions of representatives in affected policy areas. And officials from the DHS could monitor the discussions to stay on top of the latest positions on terrorist threats and strategies for infrastructure protection.

Nancy Hayden is a contributor to the CSP system and a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Labs, a research enterprise responsible for science and engineering projects that contribute to national security. Hayden has developed concepts for collaboration projects such as the Homeland Security Database for years and believes that technology plays a critical role in national security.

"In the future, we face much more complex sets of information related to preventing terrorism," says Hayden. "No single expert can know everything about this subject, and the ability to bring together relevant information and explore it from different angles is amazing. Technology will allow us to even out personal biases, sort through the information, and gain insight we've been missing up to this point."

Creating this type of collaborative, information-rich environment is something that Oracle has done for thousands of other customers. As Hoechst points out, "This can seem like a fairly large problem—connecting hundreds of people to thousands of documents—but for Oracle it is a simple data management issue." Simple from a data management standpoint, perhaps, but the opportunity to play a part in easing communication between different entities, all focused on one of the most critical issues of our time, is a role that Oracle has taken on enthusiastically.