In December 2015, the United Nations and the Government of Singapore46 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on the development of an information management tool in support of UN peacekeeping operations. The aim was to enhance situational awareness, enable trend analysis and early warning capacities in field missions. This is aligned with UN Peacekeeping Intelligence Policy stating that “ participating mission entities shall make use of standardized tools for the collation of data, including common databases, taxonomies and planned indexing and menus” (United Nations DPKO & DFS, 2017, p. 6). A UN tailored information management tool is a giant leap in the right direction and the cooperation between UN and a member state is unique, as this will most likely involve an extensive information sharing capability. The overall aim of the MOU can, for structural, procedural or technical reasons, be challenging to realize.
The MOU can enable the UN to provide systems, much aligned with Lute`s recommendation from 2014 and the High Level Panel`s recommendation to provide “relevant and substantive training to field missions, improved internal information sharing, electronic records
management and achieve data liquidity” (Lute, Bager, Dorn, Fryer, & Guha, 2014, p. 69). However, having UN turf wars in mind, it is important to underline that the information management project must be multi-dimensional in nature both when it comes to funding, support, development and use. This must be a project for the whole of UN and the signing of the MOU by the DPKO Under-Secretary should not allow increased resilience by UN entities in fear of “loosing” influence. Thus, all UN entities must be involved as functionality,
taxonomy and reporting is developed.
46 The MOU was signed by Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hervé Ladsous, and
The cooperation could provide an UN Peace Operation software platform that can facilitate exchange of information horizontally and vertically. Ideally, information-sharing standards should be developed so that all data is automatically interoperable, regardless of origin, language or security classification. Regardless of technology, the human factors will still require that trained operators on software and standards are dedicated to populate the
database. Sometimes nations do provide information coming directly from national developed software with different taxonomy and sometimes even in the form of pdf documents. Without any conversion tool the information will be useless for language or taxonomy constraints unless it is loaded by hand into databases, which will severely slow data sharing (National Academy of Engineering, 2012, p. 24).
Looking at the experiences from Mali, the ASIFU put considerable effort into improving the flow of information from the regular battalions by offering training programs and providing them with computers and village assessment formats. Despite this support, the added value of the data brought in by these battalions remained limited. Rietjens and Waard provide several reasons for this including
Illiteracy among African soldiers, limited English language skills among all personnel, both of which made it problematic to understand intelligence tasks or write after action reports, and the basic reluctance to gather and disseminate relevant information due to an unfamiliarity with the intelligence process.
Had ASIFU followed a “more organic path and put more effort into improving the stream of current intelligence coming from the main force’s battalions—for example, by bringing in additional trainers and liaison officers—its own performance would most certainly have been enhanced” (Rietjens & Waard, 2017, p. 20). Intelligence tools require solutions that
effectively can enable information sharing from one location, often remote, to higher-level headquarters, which often proves technologically challenging or expensive.
Information should, whenever possible, be collected in a standard format, using agreed taxonomy, to facilitate the collation process (United Nations DPKO & DFS, 2015, p. 11). This sound straight forward on paper, but my experience from working in NATO is that
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standardization to ensure interoperability among intelligence tools is extremely challenging47. First, most nations have their own national intelligence tools sometimes with a different taxonomy and exchange protocols. Second, taxonomy must be developed with a close cooperation between the users and the nations on the one hand and standardization and communication/technology agencies on the other. Third, once the taxonomy has been agreed upon, which is a time-consuming effort; the entities making use of the taxonomy normally have their own systems.
One common software, covering the needs of all UN entities from tactical to strategic level, is unlikely in the near future. NATO projects with capability and standardization development, involves NATO Standardization Agency (NSA) and the technical support of NATO
Communication and Information Agency (NCIA). To sum up – standardization and agreed taxonomies sound great in theory, but is time-consuming and requires a responsible body at the strategic level to coordinate between all entities, support from the nations and UN as well as the support from UN standardization and technology entities.
The 2015 MOU will hopefully provide development and standardization of tools that can enhance UN entities to make use of available information. The development of these tools will be managed by New York, in relation to funding and inter-departmental coordination, but must be supported by the vast experience of JMAC analysts to realize its full potential. Thus, the strategic level, supported by Member States, has provided an opportunity to improve information management in UN peace operations. To fully benefit from the project, the JMAC community must support procedures to mitigate challenges relating to lack of NGOs reporting and to ensure that tools contain standardized JMAC reporting formats, products and procedures.
47 I worked at NATO Joint Electronic Warfare Core Staff in the UK from 2011 to 2015. One of my tasks was to