Analytics Applications Provide Actionable Results
Intelligence communities face mounting data analysis challenges. The volume and diversity of information that is of potential intelligence value is outstripping the capabilities of conventional tools. The need to quickly and continuously glean what is truly relevant and act upon it has become even more urgent.
Currently, data analysis is fragmented into separate tool-related processes that produce independent insights and, in special circumstances, predictive models. But these processes do not produce an integrated result—one that is derived from the same sources and that drives a coherent action strategy, including triggering automatic alerts, routing critical data or initiating other processes.
One Integrated Platform Offers Significant Advantages
What intelligence communities need is a software platform that makes the systematic and automated analysis of unlimited volumes of data, including free text, available to the non-technical analyst. This simplifies identifying features in the data that are related to—and predictive of—national security issues. And by combining strategy creation and simulation, predictive modeling, deployment and reporting into one integrated platform, intelligence communities can quickly put decisions into action—repeatedly.
An integrated analytics platform has three fundamental advantages:
- It supports the full suite of analytical, planning and reporting functions required for comprehensive data-driven solutions.
- It provides an integrated development environment for customizing, testing and publishing analytical applications for operational use.
- It supports sharing and reuse of analytical applications as components of new applications—capturing the best practices of skilled analysts.
Addressing Data Analysis Challenges
An analytic application is a self-contained run-time software executable that has been designed to perform a data analysis and/or action function. It may be composed of single or multiple components, making it both powerful and easy to customize. Some examples of components that an analytical application may include are mixed data extractors and processors, prediction models, classifiers, event detectors, action strategies, report definitions and connectors to other systems for data routing and alerting.
Analytical applications are perfectly suited for deployment to environments where data volumes and performance requirements are high and continuous autonomous operation without fault is essential. Such applications support both the strategic mission of intelligence collection and analysis, and also perform tactical analyses for the purpose of supporting urgent tasks, such as classifying and staging documents for immediate access and specialized analysis. Applications can be as simple as data routing systems using queries as filters, or may include several embedded applications to leverage a series of refined analyses and/or predictive models as input to an action strategy.
Applied in Data Staging
A data-staging analytical application can continuously monitor multiple sources of data and route copies of documents that satisfy search conditions to staging locations where analysts can readily access and interact with them. The advantage to this approach is that analysts have immediate access to current, specialized collections of data as a starting point for RFI research and exploratory analysis without competing for database time on several networks. For example, document collections addressing certain regions of the world or organizations, or specific types of threats, can be aggregated in real-time so that they are always current and always ready for local analysis. This enables the fastest possible response using the most relevant data available.
Enabling Actionable Intelligence
An integrated analytics platform offers intuitive application development and deployment modules for data mining, analysis, outcome prediction and simulation, programmable action strategies and reporting. By capturing and automating sophisticated routine analysis and modeling tasks, such a platform eliminates the need for computer language coding or special technical skills to produce run-time applications that address the most challenging intelligence objectives, including the monitoring, and automated detection and classification of communication and transaction patterns in high volume data streams. This offers intelligence communities the ability to plan, predict and perform the kinds of critical analyses they require, at unheard of speed, without any compromise to quality.
Intelligent Results (
www.intelligentresults.com) provides customer analytics and decision management software that makes it possible to move from question, to action, to optimal results with dramatic speed. Intelligent Results' software is deployed globally by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) to generate actionable intelligence from the volumes of both structured and unstructured text data they collect and monitor. This same technology is also in use at some of the largest financial services, telecommunication and pharmaceutical organizations in the U.S. including five of the top ten banks. For more information visit www.intelligentresults.com/government.