The collection operations life cycle
To be an effective organization that is collecting data that fulfills your intelligence-gathering needs, appropriate planning is needed with special consideration around the established collection priorities, any special RFIs, and administration of collection operations on a recurring basis. Start your operations planning by evaluating any collection metrics that may have been derived about your existing collection effectiveness first. We will be covering collection metrics in more detail later in the chapter. It's important to understand that operations planning is a cyclical process like the intelligence life cycle. You can visualize the collection operations life cycle in Figure 6.2:
Figure 6.2 – Collection operations life cycle
A review of your team's effectiveness will help identify any areas in which more investment is needed into resources and allow you to understand the weaknesses in your collection...
