Mission: Impossible?

Azmi

After Zalmai Azmi joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation as its chief information officer in 2004, he was understandably shocked to learn that the organization didn't have a centralized budget for information technology. That explained why he, the top technology officer for one of the world's best-known crime-fighting organizations, oversaw annual expenditures of exactly $5,800.

But that wasn't the half of it.

He would come to find out that most FBI agents had no email. Or access to the Web. Or their own computers. Or, for that matter, a sophisticated computerized database to track and share casework. They could not get tech support after hours because the help desk at the FBI shut down each night at 7 p.m.

"We don't have a great track record around here," Azmi observes.

Azmi's office is on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC, the legendary concrete edifice that houses FBI headquarters. Half his space is outfitted with the standard appointments of an executive's workspace--an expansive wooden desk, bookshelves, plaques. The other half, however, is plastered with oversized charts packed with marker-scrawled graphics and workflow arrows. It has the unbuttoned, organic look of a rescue effort in progress--which is precisely what it is.

More than five years after the 9/11 attacks spurred a top-to-bottom redesign of its mission and culture, the FBI is still battling to change itself--to adapt to the 21st-century world of technology and terrorism. It's not just a matter of installing computers, which in any case has proven far from simple. The FBI must address the way its people are hired, managed, and trained. It has to fix the way they communicate and the way decisions are made. It has to remedy a balky, hierarchical structure that sometimes thwarts local action.

That is, the FBI must change nearly everything about itself.

It could be among the most difficult organizational reinventions of our time. It's certainly among the most important: At stake is not quarterly profits and stock price, but the safety and security of America. The FBI is charged with protecting Americans from terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and specifically mandated to take the lead in matters of counterterrorism and counterintelligence. It's that mandate that's at the heart of the organization's current reinvention effort, because the FBI was formed in a much different era to do a much different job.

Before 9/11 exposed a startling mosaic of operational failures, the FBI, with its 31,000 employees, 56 U.S. field offices, and 50 foreign outposts, had earned an unquestioned standing as one of the world's preeminent crime-solving entities. Over the decades, its agents had successfully pursued countless bank robbers, narcotics traffickers, organized-crime kingpins, corrupt politicians, and serial killers.

The problem: Everything about the FBI--its organizational structures and processes, its incentive systems, its decision-making mechanisms, its culture--had evolved to support a mission of solving crimes and bringing criminals to justice after the deed. Today, the far more important mission demands that the agency gather intelligence and prevent acts before they occur. That new role requires different approaches to communication and coordination, different technologies, wholly different ways of thinking and problem solving.

People who know the FBI best--including many who've spent their careers there--would say that its culture, leadership philosophy, and links to the political arena make major change in "the bureau," as it is also known, highly improbable. It is, they argue, just too entrenched, too bureaucratic, too rigid, too old, too slow to understand and execute the scale and sweep of change that needs to happen.

"It's almost a total transformation of what the bureau does and how it does it. It's staggering," says Dick Thornburgh, a former U.S. attorney general who, at the request of Congress, is providing feedback and counsel on the FBI's transformation. In an interview in his Washington, DC, office, Thornburgh praises the determination of FBI leadership to pull off the transformation. But he also hints broadly at an uphill battle. "The bureau has simply not been as attentive to management and strategy and planning as most organizations of its size and reach," he says.

For decades, the FBI thrived with a compartmentalized, highly decentralized organization. When it came to snuffing drug traffickers or sniffing out political corruption, the talents, instincts, and efforts of a single agent in a field office always trumped the generic strategy devised by a detached bureaucrat back at headquarters.