Interesting article but not in the least surprising. European agencies have had several decades to synchronise their intelligence gathering but it was a very tough slog getting past the turf wars.
If I remember correctly, pre-September 11 there were nine US federal agencies concerned with national security, plus a plethora of police forces and others. Each with its own set of blinders. Looking at it from the outside it doesn't look as if it's been streamlined, just another layer of beaurocracy added.
Databases of the type mentioned in the article are not rocket science. Developing the machine intelligence to sift through them for intelligence is. And once you've developed the artificial intelligence, you need real human brains to evaluate the intelligence intuitively and then act effectively on it - and that's way beyond rocket science.