The AIPIO (www.aipio.asn.au) is the peak representative body for intelligence practitioners in Australia. Our goal is to establish and promote intelligence as a widely recognised profession in Australia, and our membership is drawn from a wide range of fields including government, national security, the armed forces, law enforcement, business, academia, the media, information technology and information service providers.
Intelligence 2021 will be held from 24-25 February 2022 at Hilton Adelaide.
The Evolving Intelligence Landscape
The Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) Inc is committed to growing the intelligence body of knowledge through fostering scholarship, professionalisation of practice, support to major intelligence research projects, as well as professional and social collaboration amongst practitioners at our events.
We believe intelligence professionals will be transformed in the 21st Century through an operating environment marked by the unexpected and the unpredictable. In anticipating and responding to continuously evolving security risks, intelligence professionals will likely be tracking new combinations of non-state and state-sponsored actors who threaten to disrupt civil society. Shifting strategic alliances amongst these hostile actors, military conflicts, the presence of terrorist factions and street gangs, and deteriorating local economies will add to the complexity of intelligence work. At the same time, hostile actors will have access to new resources, including computing technologies and cyberspace operations, as well as chemical and biological agents that will amplify their power to inflict harm and disrupt daily life and commerce. We must prepare the intelligence enterprise for these rapid changes ahead by shaping agile intelligence professionals, assimilating new technologies and building practices that can anticipate and respond at will.
Each year, the AIPIO promotes a theme to focus this investment in thought leadership across the full range of our activities.
In 2021, the AIPIO theme will be ‘The Evolving Intelligence Landscape’, with four sub-themes – business, criminal, regulatory, and security – each representing established and emerging domains of practice across the intelligence landscape. New domains of intelligence practice – which enhance the national intelligence enterprise – should be driven by the adoption of intelligence-led approaches to deal with novel challenges in complex operating environments. These new domains of intelligence practice are following different capability development pathways differentiated by mandates, methods, terminology, technological enablement, oversight and level of professionalisation.
Intelligence 2021 will explore these points of differentiation across the evolving intelligence landscape, reflecting on the broader development of the intelligence profession in Australia from its traditional roots in national security and cultural impediments hampered by tradition. The conference will address ‘where we have come from,’ ‘where we are now’, and ‘where we are heading’ as a national intelligence enterprise. For example, we are already seeing new intelligence career opportunities for prospective and experienced professionals across the evolving intelligence landscape. Intelligence 2021 offers a trusted and collaborative environment – both physical and virtual – to network and share these insights for mutual benefit.
