Follow this link to the story How Not to Counter Terrorism by Ex-FBI Agent Coleen Rowley and Other Intelligence Veterans January 14, 2010 (Originally Posted June 18, 2007)

This is yet another story that adds fuel to my observation that fixing the failure to analyze massive amounts of data is not done by increasing the amount of data. This was part of my comment in the previous post Consider How Well We’ve Done Against Terrorism Since 2001.

Also in the article they mention that one of the reasons for the FBI having a 10 Most Wanted List, is to have a way of focusing on what they consider to be the most important cases and not try to concentrate their resources on everything.

This reminds me of a situation that I observed when working for a semiconductor company in Texas.  We had a pilot line that processed integrated circuits that were being designed by our development engineers.  There were certain projects that were very important and time sensitive.  These were put on the priority list of the pilot line so that these devices could be processed ahead of other items that were before them in the queue.  Soon pretty much everything was on the priority list.

In response to this a hot list was put in place for the truly important projects. When everything got onto the hot list, they just changed the name again.

If they had thought of a top ten list, there just would have be item 1, item 1a, etc. until everything was on the top 10 list.

This behavior is just human nature. The reactions to this were just management’s human natured response to try to get ahead of the engineers’ human nature. It is a never ending battle to try to remember that there are priorities and not everything can be an emergency.

Of course a real top 10 list enforced by really strong management would have insisted that if a new item went on the top 10 list then an item that was already on the list would have to go. This would have forced people to make a decision when it is much easier to avoid making decisions.  The department could have ground to a halt with constant meetings about juggling a real top 10 list.  Sometimes it is just easier to pretend than it is to fight human nature.