The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

As a key component of the nation’s “soft power,” diplomacy will need to harness the potential of big “I” tech- nologies if Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power” is to be realized. We know there is no reason for U.S. diplomats not to be the best-informed on the planet. The challenge is in finding new applications, ways of working and skill sets to do that. For the department, the information resources available must not only facilitate communica- tion, but intense and rapid learning. Getting the Size Right In computing, government has been present from the beginning. In 1946, the same year that Kennan trans- mitted his famous “Long Telegram,” the University of Pennsylvania built ENIAC, the world’s first true digital computer, for the United States Army. For every large mainframe that IBM or the Digital Equipment Corp. de- signed, Uncle Sam could be counted on as a major customer. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the U.S. gov- ernment bought big systems, usually composed of large computing cores connected to large numbers of “dumb” terminals. State was no different than the De- partment of Defense or the Federal Aviation Administration in seeing merit in automation. It rolled out the Foreign Affairs Information Manage- ment Effort, the first of many infor- mation management plans, in 1964. FAIME was an interagency effort, aimed at modernizing “the flow and handling of information within and among the Department of State, the Agency for International Develop- ment, the United States Information Agency, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.” Though well intended, it died quietly a few years later. After significant investment inWang hardware and software, the department eventually made its way to the same M A R C H 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45