Early Warning Systems
Avoiding Costly Information Failures
In information management circles, some will tell you the concept of “information overload” has become cliché—a convenient red herring used to distract from more fundamental corporate performance issues.
Yet, others will point to recent glaring information access and sharing failures across Europe and the United States as proof that information overload is indeed real and increasingly quite costly.
As it turns out, both points of view are valid. The former perspective highlights that information overload is not well defined or understood, hence the inability to manage it or measure its true impact. On the flip side, the latter view has recent history on its side, where we’ve seen national security let down its country and human services fail its most innocent citizens.
The question is, how well is your “information overload is a fantasy” argument going to hold up when your organization is hit with a crippling information failure?
In matters such as these, there is a fine line between heroes and villains. The distinction often boils down to: who is proactive with information management strategies, and who is too busy fighting fires to think straight?
But rather than travel down the path of a potential false dichotomy, let us focus instead on what is actually happening in commercial and government sectors around the world and highlight some of the ways organizations are establishing early warning systems to ward off information failure.
Information Sharing
Within the span of just a few months, media outlets screamed with headlines decrying major lapses in information sharing, leaving government officials scratching their heads and thinking, “If we only knew what we knew!” Such pondering might have won points with Donald Rumsfeld, but a mea culpa such as this does not fly with the general public, whose confidence in its government continues to wane in light of these events.
In the United States, federal intelligence bodies failed to “connect the dots” they had been compiling when Al-Qaeda terrorist Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab attempted to blow up an airliner last Christmas Day.
In the United Kingdom, the cases of Khyra Ishaq and Baby P highlighted the all-too-common lack of early warning systems that could have saved the lives of young victims. Child protection services agencies possessed the information that could have protected Ishaq and Baby P but not the infrastructure necessary to alert them to potential problems.
These, of course, are just the most recent examples of a persistent issue. But our biggest failure to date in trying to tackle these challenges is to insist on a complex consulting engagement where we attempt to merge massive amounts of information from disparate data sources.
We use search engines to find the best price on a new TV. We rely on the search engine to go and scan multiple data sources and bring back an aggregated minimum set of results. We don’t ask that all the data sources from all TV manufacturers be integrated.
Surely we should be using the same approach when we think about aggregating data to reduce crime. The fact is most data repositories are purpose-built for the type of information they contain; physically aggregating these large data sources into a single, monolithic repository reduces their effectiveness and is quite simply a waste of time and taxpayer funds.
At the risk of oversimplifying the solution, one cannot argue that a formidable search capability sitting on top of the data wouldn’t yield a sizable improvement in both intelligence gathering and sharing. Over the 20 years we have been in business, we have seen this function play out countless times, both with routine content and mission-critical information. Our work with law enforcement and government agencies over the years has produced a validated roadmap for effective information sharing.
Early Case Assessment
In the commercial sector, the human consequences might not be as dire or evident, but information access failure costs corporations millions, if not billions, each year. Whether civil action is heavy or light, lack of clarity into your corporate knowledge produces a handful of various scenarios, in which your company can be:
A. Subject to sanctions for failure to produce content during discovery;
B. Forced to settle, due to the inability to predict how costly a case might be; and
C. Forced to settle, due to an inability to accurately determine the probability of a successful outcome.
In recent months, we have been working more and more with both law firms and general counsel on early case assessment strategies. These organizations are taking a proactive approach to managing their risk and assessing potential litigation well in advance of it becoming an issue.
A search engine is at the heart of this approach.
Corporate Compliance
In another recent example, we have seen our customers become more aggressive with their voluntary audits. These run the gamut of voluntary financial audits to more often compliance audits that look for the existence or non-existence of potentially sensitive data on internal systems.
With each of these projects, we are told the results are more than alarming. Fortunately in these scenarios, customers are proactively discovering pitfalls for themselves, rather than being caught off guard by a potential legal situation.
Whether we are talking about information sharing at the highest levels of government or ongoing insight into a corporation’s legal vulnerabilities, there exists a simple yet elegant solution that to date has been underutilized.
The rich foundation of an indexing and content analysis engine, when combined with basic database clustering tools, has delivered a viable solution time and again. More importantly, it is the sensible first step that costs significantly less time and money than the standard database consulting arrangement.
Established in 1988, ISYS Search Software is a global supplier of enterprise search solutions for information access, management and re-use. The company’s award-winning software suite offers a broad range of search, navigation and discovery solutions for enterprise search, mobile search and embedded search applications. ISYS has been deployed by thousands of organizations operating in a variety of industries, including government, legal, law enforcement, financial services, healthcare and recruitment. Contact us to learn more about our work in helping customers establish early warning systems that support their initiatives in the areas of information sharing, early case assessment and corporate compliance.