Introduction
The primary mission of the National Intelligence Managers (NIMs) teams is to consolidate and integrate power for national intelligence investigations, collection, plans, and measures within Intelligence competencies and performance. The NIM process promotes complex solutions for critical IC mission and enterprise opportunities, challenges, and gaps.
Such a management process is focused on engaging the broad spectrum of IC expertise, well-timed response to policies’ standards, determining knowledge deficiencies, and efficient management of collection and analysis. In addition, it aims to manage functions and resources according to prioritized and contingency precedencies of national security.
The Assessment of the NIM Process in Risk Management
In terms of global threat management and prevention, the NIMs serve as a delegated authority within ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence). According to UMUC, its management approach enables the IC to leverage Community-wide knowledge about particular countries and issues, timely react to policymakers’ Intelligence needs, and determine a lack of expertise within the Community. As such, the ODNI’s designation of a NIM South Asia/Afghanistan-Pakistan allows the intelligence community to attract a broad range of resources and opportunities to counteract the Administration’s particularly pressing national security challenges. Furthermore, the NIM process is pivotal for ODNI since it is responsible for coordinating all the operations related to its portfolios.
The national intelligence managers perform the critical functions as senior advisors for DNI (Director of National Intelligence) in terms of community control and coordination of their specific operational area. They provide the whole set of informational needs concerning their mission area by maintaining high-level relations with the Intelligence, policymaking, and warfare communities.
The NIMs also design and implement Unifying Intelligence Strategies, schemes, and campaigning to incorporate the community’s activities. Another responsibility implies integrating the IC’s collection, analysis, counterespionage, and financial approach. The NIM process proves its effectiveness in addressing the global threat environment to provide warning and situational awareness by adhering to the aspects defined by the Director of National Intelligence Mission Managers (2005), such as:
- understanding of customer requirements concerning the assigned objectives;
- setting the collection and analysis priorities for a referral to the NIM Board;
- forming integrated collection strategies against assigned objectives;
- determining collection disparities and state of analysis;
- identifying unmet needs according to the assigned goals.
Nevertheless, political risk became a vital and complicated challenge in the twenty-first century. Apart from national governments that lead the business environment, there is a significant number the political risk from other players. These include “individuals wielding cell phones, local officials issuing city ordinances, terrorists detonating truck bombs, UN officials administering sanctions, and others” (Rice & Zegart, 2018, para. 2).
Nowadays, the political risk might significantly affect modern enterprises. Rice & Zegart (2018) identified the critical competencies of companies that surpass risk management, such as understanding, analyzing, mitigating, and responding. The companies that are at the cutting edge of managing global political risk commonly create internal threat-assessment groups by engaging former intelligence and policing specialists to track the real-time political climate.
Conclusion
The NIM process is an efficient approach to managing IC-wide resources and addressing the global threat environment. However, the new century provides constant challenges, as well as for the business enterprises that interact with the former IC agents. The strategic risk affects the IC’s ability to give adequate intelligence for the decision-making policies on national security issues. The global threat environment can challenge the IC’s capacity to control events and alert policymakers of all evolving situations. Therefore, the IC and NIMs should be focused on new approaches to determine better and communicate areas to face risks and maintain a proactive and flexible position against emerging threats.
References
Director of National Intelligence Mission Managers. (2005). Intelligence community policy memorandum. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Rice, C., & Zegart, A. (2018). Managing 21st-century political risk. Harvard Business Review. Web.
UMUC. Managing Global Threats. Lecture.