When I became a CIA operations officer, I wasn’t thinking about data pipelines.
I was thinking about people, information, and the mission. About understanding what was happening and getting the right information to the people who needed it.
But somewhere behind every useful piece of intelligence was a less glamorous reality: someone had to get the information collected, processed, connected, and delivered.
Nobody puts that part in the movie.
They probably should. Although “We finally resolved the schema mismatch” would be a difficult line to build a trailer around.
The People Behind the Information
In the field, I relied on talented people to help get me good information. I was fortunate to have them.
They needed reliable ways to ingest and prepare data so analysts could connect the dots and mission teams could act. That meant more than getting information quickly. It meant preserving context, understanding where it came from, and having confidence in what it actually told us.
A useful connection buried in an inaccessible system was still buried. Information that arrived after a decision had been made couldn’t inform that decision.
The people behind that work made an enormous difference. Often, their effort was invisible precisely because they made things work.