CDR: NSA Releases Reorg Reports

[John Young]

NSA released today on its Web site two reports on
its reorganization, one by an external team of 27 page, 
another of 76 pages by an internal team. Both are big 
PDF files.  We have converted the first to HTML:

   http://cryptome.org/nsa-reorg-et.htm  (77KB)

Here is an excerpt:

"We interviewed about one hundred people in the Agency, 
including most senior leaders, and asked very specific 
questions about the way people operate and the embedded 
culture. We learned the Agency is a very bureaucratic 
government organization, and that most of the behavior 
patterns were established during the 1970s and 1980s 
when there was plenty of money to execute its mission. 

NSA appears to operate like an entitlement program. 
Most people in the Agency are highly motivated and work 
very hard, but a portion does not.

We also found a leadership culture that appears most 
interested in focusing on their positions and protecting 
their people's jobs at the expense of accomplishing the 
mission.

Most of the people at NSA are hired night out of college 
and spend their entire lives in the Agency. Regardless 
of their work performance and their job responsibility, 
the Agency promotes people roughly at the same rate. 
The institution encouraged people to get deeply involved 
in the promotion process, to the point that civilian 
personnel wrote their own promotion reports, and 
supervisors endorsed the reports even if they did not 
agree, mostly to prevent animosity.

However, the most critical aspect of the people and 
culture in the institution was the mindset related to 
lack of empowerment and accountability.

NSA's present culture overemphasizes loyalty to a 
particular function and its associated senior leadership, 
instead of full and frank discussions of problems, issues 
and concerns. This has created a culture that discourages 
sending bad news up the chain of command. The staff knows 
NSA is falling behind and is not properly addressing the 
inherent problems of the emerging global network, and the 
present management infrastructure does not appear to be 
supporting the required changes.

In addition, we are concerned the present mindset fostered 
a society where people were afraid to express their own 
thoughts. Even though people spoke to us with true candor, 
they always wanted to avoid attribution because of the 
perception that the information was going to be used 
against them."

From: 

External Team Report: a Management Review for the Director, NSA, 
October 22, 2000

  http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_external_team_report.pdf (2.7MB)

Second report:

  http://www.nsa.gov/releases/nsa_new_enterprise_team_recommendations.pdf
(6.4MB)