Critical Thinking Skills for Intelligence Analysis

Whether performed by national agencies or local law enforcement, the ultimate objective of intelligence analysis is to develop timely inferences that can be acted upon with confidence. To this end, effective intelligence analysis consists of integrating collected information and then developing and testing hypotheses based on that information through successive iterations of additional data collection, evaluation, collation, integration and inductive reasoning. The desired end products are inferences that specify the who, what, when, where, why and how of the activity of interest and lead to appropriate actions. This process is illustrated in Figure 1.