Information Sharing has been a hot topic lately. And it sounds like last week's Second National Fusion Center Conference was interesting. While DHS issued a release extoling the virtues of fusion centers, Rep Jane Harmon took DHS to task about not doing enough to facilitate the sharing of information between the Federal government and state, local, and tribal governments. Funding of the fusion center initiative was called into play.

This exchange made me think back to a conversation we had at the February meeting of the INPUT Executive Program that may shed some light on some blocking and tackling issues at Fusion Centers. Highly qualified analysts are key to making the network of fusion centers effective. Jim Marks, who runs DHS's grant programs spoke about how the department's funding was originally used to "buy stuff" whereas now DHS is looking for more strategic investments, including fusion center development. However, Chris Logan, Program Director, Homeland Security and Technology Division, National Governors Association Center for Best Practices pointed out a problem. It takes about 18 months to train a fusion center analyst, Logan said, and DHS grants cannot be used to fund an analyst for more than 2 years. So, fusion centers trying to find the money to build their analyst staff are struggling. Perhaps this would be one fix that could be implemented before threats to cut off funding are honored.