18 - The agency manager

Summary

Important as the centre is, success and failure still depend mainly on how individual agencies are managed. Modern management theory tends to emphasize ‘informal’, ‘organic’ styles and structures, and points to questions of ‘organizational culture’ and management ‘style’. Some of it also takes a ‘contingency’ view of organization and management: that the optimum form depends on the nature of the job, the workforce, the environment and the organizational culture. This chapter first considers these factors in intelligence, and whether they pose special challenges and point to particular solutions. It then discusses the implications for management and offers some conclusions.

Obviously these are generalizations about diverse operations. More weight is given here to big, technical collection and processing than to what are still the smaller activities. But the impact of technology is increasing the ‘production’ element. In any case intelligence as a whole has some distinctive characteristics, and conclusions drawn from the big organizations apply in some degree to all of it.

Work and skills

Large-scale processing was discussed earlier. Bletchley's production line built up around cipher-breaking machines set a pattern. The Second World War also saw the introduction of large-scale data-handling and indexing, applying en masse the techniques of individual scholarship. Subsequently the power of computers has given a further impetus towards man–machine interaction. Intelligence resources now need to be described in terms of computer power as well as staff numbers.