Brandon Wales — Deputy Director, HITRAC, DHS — 2nd Plenary Session

Bio (From the SARMA Conference Agenda)

Brandon Wales is the Deputy Director of the Threat and Risk Analysis Center (HITRAC), the DHS’s infrastructure-intelligence fusion center. Under Wales, HITRAC has emerged as a leading provider of classified and unclassified, infrastructure-related threat and risk analysis to Federal, State, and local authorities, and the private sector, and he is regularly called upon to brief the White House and Congressional leadership on HITRAC’s programs. He received an Exceptional Performance Award in 2006 from the DNI for his work preparing specialized Intelligence Community Threat Assessments by the National Intelligence Council.

Before the DHS, Mr. Wales served as the principle national security aide to U.S. Senator Jon Kyl. From 97-04, he was a Senior Associate with the Center for Security Policy. He was the project coordinator for the Center’s program on International Islamist Threat.

Abstract (SARMA Agenda)

In his presentation, “Challenges for the Infrastructure Risk Analysis Community,” Mr. Wales will address the gaps and challenges the community will need to address in the year, and years, to come, including the need for increased awareness and coordination horizontally, amongst the varying risk analysis efforts currently underway and planned, as well as vertically between the risk analysis and their customers at the National, regional, state, local, territorial, tribal, or owner/operator level through customer-centric decision support. Mr. Wales will use the strategic infrastructure risk analysis work of the HITRAC as context for his discussion with conference participants.

The Speech

The first topic covered was his mission. This includes taking stock in challenges and to find common solutions. He then highlighted challenges, including integration and communication.

Risk Analysis Boom

The current rise in risk analysis professionals has made integration and communication more difficult. We need to learn from past and not reinvent the wheel when contracting risk analysis problems. The question is, how can we learn without overloading information? The lack of answers to this question has caused the access of information to become increasingly difficult. Now that we’ve seen potential problems, we need to look at the benefits of growth. There is a need to respond to the increasing need in the field. Next, the problem of many different methodologies comes into play. He proposed customized methodologies tailored to the situation your are in. Also, more decision maker requirements need to be met sooner. Would you rather have 80% today, or 100% in 3 years? Most would take the 80% now because the benefits of the extra 20% is not worth 3 years. The problem is, most decision makers have little power to act in the short term. Plans must be thought out to last 3, 4, 5 years down the road. This type of forward decision is difficult.

While we are faced with this exponential growth, assessing the keys to sustainable growth is how we keep the field stable. Developing mechanisms through collaboration and coordination is Mr. Wales’ proposal. This is a monumental task because of a lack of desire to do the extra work. Mr. Wales brought up the example of the NIP and how it sat for a year with no progress made. They needed to assess foreign dependencies and to stop being intimidated by daunting tasks.

Collaboration

Collaboration is defined as actively pursuing synergies within our work. He asked the question, what challenges can we overcome? and stated that the best way to help is to work together. His example is the HITRAC, they meet strategic requirements and learn from previous lessons on what the best practices to take are. They are working on sharing expertise to help others accelerate because we cannot go it alone in this field.

Integration

Our resources cannot keep pace with the boom in the field. We need to get away from answering all the questions similarly and do good work. This is important because good work begets more work, which can be a problem if we get overloaded. This is why another importance is setting realistic expectations.

Effective Risk Communication

Support of the decision maker who takes ideas into reality can help us prioritize what risks we need to assess. We also need to stay away from using jargon that only professionals understand. This will help us bridge the communication gap that is slowly increasing. The key is to continue to practice and learn from each other. The jargon issue also presents itself while collaborating requirement development. He recommendation is to begin in layman’s terms so that gaps can be prioritized based on the resources at hand.

Partners, not Customers

I hope you can see something in common by now, more communications lead to more effectiveness. We arm our customers with the information they want knowing that we cannot afford to move forward without risk analysis. This led into the issue of uncertainty. He said that education is very important to mitigating uncertainty. We can’t avoid this issue because there is a demand for high confidence level. Which calls for detailed analysis. Your analysis must be meaningful because some reports can be useless if they are too general.

Communication Operational Constraints

We cannot promise too much to our costumers because that would lead to high expectations we couldn’t always meet. Actionable analysis needs to be performed on the decision maker. You have to ask the questions: What is the problem? and What can we do? Then we can dive into analytic findings to discover important information. Here we can monitor if vulnerability is a risk and what protective measures need to be taken. Then, we can see is there is any chemical risk along with any other risks facing what we are assessing. Now we can move decision makers remembering that high risk does not equal action. We have to move away from addiction to high risk, low probability risks while not ignoring the tops or tails.

Summing it all up

Mr. Wales is an important person in this field and this speech was very good. Being the second speech of the entire conference, it helped to set the tone of what we were in for. We were in for learning more about our field in three days than we knew up to this point.