The Intelligence Cycle is one of information processing: data is gathered, organized, analyzed, and summarized. In the current
environment, there is a large amount of data available for Intelligence Analysts (IAs); therefore, a considerable amount of
time is spent in the gathering and organizing phases, leaving little time for analysis and summarization. Thus, software tools
that help with
... [Show full abstract] acquiring and categorizing new data are extremely useful to IAs.
The concept of Personal Information Management (PIM) is currently a hot topic of research, although its basic ideas have a
long history. In this chapter we argue that many of the goals of PIM research are highly relevant to tasks that gather and
organize large amounts of data; in particular, to Intelligence tasks. Hence, the intelligence community should pay attention
to the developments in this area. After providing some basic background on the Intelligence Cycle, we examine the concept
of PIM, point out some issues that are relevant to intelligence work, and discuss some areas of research that PIMs should
address in order to be even more relevant to the Intelligence Community.