Directorate of Digital Innovation

Our Mission and Priorities

To maintain our strategic advantage across all domains, CIA must win in the digital domain against our most capable adversaries. DDI’s Digital Strategy emphasizes integration, agility, and innovation to accelerate the development and deployment of digital capabilities across all aspects of CIA’s mission, to ensure CIA remains the forerunner in the global struggle for digital intelligence supremacy. Our strategy focuses on five key pillars.

What We Do

Officers within the Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI) are at the forefront of the complex and continuously evolving technological landscape. Officers must be experts in the digital environment of today as well as change agents for the CIA, anticipating and preparing for over-the-horizon digital trends of the future. DDI brings together the expertise and functions of IT, data, artificial intelligence, cyber collection, cyber defense, and open-source intelligence. The alignment and integration of these elements allows the Agency to remain on the cutting edge of digital capabilities to stay out in front of our adversaries.

Through their daily work and continuous training, DDI officers and our partners bring and continue to develop the expertise needed to keep pace with the rapid advancements in technology. The DDI does everything from enterprise IT to cyber collection and artificial intelligence, and supports teams and groups both local and all over the world. Though we are one directorate, we are part of a broader team of officers and individuals across the CIA, the Intelligence Community, industry, and academia focused on delivering the best in digital capabilities and tradecraft.

History

Years ago, the national security landscape had begun to change significantly, driven by advancements in technology and the emergence of new digital and cyber threats. The Agency recognized that with this rapid evolution of the digital landscape, technological advancements had made its intelligence mission exponentially more complex. The Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI) was created in October of 2015 to effectively optimize and leverage the power of digital technologies in furtherance of mission.

DDI brings together IT, data, artificial intelligence, cyber collection, cyber defense, and open-source intelligence to harness their power for the Agency in a way that was never possible before they were aligned as elements of an integrated team. The standup of this new Directorate was designed to calibrate the intelligence enterprise to the emerging threats in the digital domain. As such, a key function of the DDI is to connect the right subject matter, technical, and digital experts so that this Agency can collaboratively and effectively counter threats. As part of the DDI’s stand-up, the Agency Data Office (ADO) and the Chief Data Officer (CDO) roles were established.

Although DDI was officially established in 2015, several groups within DDI pre-date the directorate. The earliest predecessor to the DDI’s Open Source Enterprise (OSE), the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS), predates the CIA, as it was created in February 1941 to focus on foreign print and radio, such as monitoring Nazi Germany radio broadcasts. By 1946, the FBMS became the Federal Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS) and transferred to the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As technology advanced throughout the decades, offices dedicated to digital technology formed under various directorates. Elements of the DS&T and DO, which over the years were focused on the use of computers in support of operations, eventually formed the basis of today’s CCI.

Today’s DDI houses the most current iteration of many former offices that separately focused on technology, HUMINT, or clandestine operations with the intent of fusing these once disparate disciplines into a single Agency approach towards today’s digital landscape. Throughout CIA’s history, our predecessors were confronted with unprecedented challenges that compelled them to invent new solutions. While the current digital landscape is uniquely complex and ever-changing, our officers take pride in knowing that we inherit a great tradition of agility, creativity, and commitment to mission.

Careers

The Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI) serves as the engine of creativity, integration, and rigor needed in the digital age, ensuring that our culture, tradecraft, and knowledge management across the board are prepared to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. DDI officers arm the Agency with forward-thinking tools and techniques to compete in the cyber arena. They also work with other directorates to identify opportunities for innovation. Depending on their skill sets, officers can take part in anything from software development to open-source collection.

The Directorate of Digital Innovation also has a strong team of data scientists and engineers to support analysis in the world of big data. With such a wide range of needs across CIA, officers must stay agile and adaptive throughout their careers. DDI prioritizes consistent learning and growth throughout officers’ entire careers.