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Although she’s saving hard to buy her first apartment, Alice loves to donate to charity. But she has been increasingly concerned that her donations may not find their way to the intended recipient, recalling a recent press story that in Sierra Leone, a global vaccine provider suspended $530,000 of pledged aid after it was uncovered that the funds had been misappropriated [2]. Alice has recently discovered charitychain.org. This revolutionary new donation platform gives Alice total confidence that the money she donates finds its way to the intended good causes, wherever they are located.

Alice has rapidly become a big fan of charitychain.org. Just last week she donated $80 to help fund a school for teenage girls in Africa and through their smartphone app, she can see that $75 are now being used by an accredited local building company to build a new science classroom. Alice is even able to access a photograph of the work as it progresses, encouraging her to donate further to help with completion before the new school year starts.

Whilst not at all technically minded, Alice has heard that charitychain.org uses new distributed ledger technology to drive complete transparency into the end to end donation process[3]. This gives her total trust in the charities, good causes and local agents because they are registered on charitychain.org and Alicia can access feedback from other donors. Key members of the charitychain.org network must agree to all transactions involving Alice’s donation are valid through a process known as consensus. And she can see a complete audit trail of all the donations she has made and how they have been used to help her preferred good causes.

At a recent social event Alice met Peter. Peter works for the Charities Commission, the national charities regulator. It turned out that Peter is also a big fan of charitychain.org, but for different reasons. Peter is amazed that charitychain.org has virtually eliminated disputes in the donation process. Since his employer is also part of the charitychain.org network they can see the complete flow of donations and their usage, hence being much more efficient in their regulatory oversight role. Peter also told Alice about the Commissions’ recent discussion with a leading charity. The charity also loves charitychain.org as a new, trusted channel for raising much needed funds for key projects in Africa & Asia whilst providing total clarity on how funds are being spent - from the donor to the recipient. The Commission are also looking forward to seeing charitychain.org growing over time to bring the benefits of a corruption free charities, good causes and local agents to an ever increasing global network.

Alice is delighted that she has discovered charitychain.org! It gives her the confidence and trust she needs and makes her feel so much better about her continued, passionate support of her favourite charity.

Notes

[1] This story - including charitychain.org - is fictitious; the intention is to illustrate the practical benefits of distributed ledger technology to a non-technical audience.

[2] https://globalprosperity.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/corruption-a-threat-to-international-aid-in-fragile-countries/

[3] https://www.hyperledger.org

Captain Ian Rencomb has run the intelligence cell of a major European military for 18 months. During this time, he has seen the bad guys increasing their use of social media technologies to plan and execute their missions. Thankfully, his unit has been able to respond in kind, get ahead of this threat and keep his colleagues safe.

Their fight back started with Ian and his boss attending an IBM conference about how social media, big data and analytics technologies could help combat this evolving threat and make his department more efficient at intelligence production.

Too good to be true? They thought so until IBM ran a pilot project for them.

Ian was not an expert in social media. He has seen his kids glued to Facebook twenty-four hours a day and was an occasional user of LinkedIn to keep track of his highly mobile professional network. Until the pilot started, he was unaware that commercial- grade equivalent technologies were available; ones that could be run behind a firewall to make it easier for him to form ad hoc teams to work on intelligence product creation. Ian thought of these teams as akin to rugby scrums.

Ian could assemble a team to solve a problem based on each individual’s knowledge and expertise. The person’s division, organizational department, or physical location did not matter. Being able to set up these ad hoc teams made a difference in the unit’s ability to support the vast number of mission types they faced, ranging from cyber attacks to peacekeeping activities.

The second phase of the IBM pilot project focused on collecting social media activity and using this to augment their open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis capability. IBM built a collection and analysis system from standard software building blocks. It worked in parallel to the existing systems, and IBM worked with the in-house experts to encode their working methods into the rules-based analysis process. They used the IBM i2® Analyst’s Notebook® to allow the staff to visualize and analyze the network of bad guys.

The real breakthrough came when IBM put the two parts of the pilot project together. Ian and his team were surprised to find that the “scrum-based” analyses of social media interactions were as good as their traditional collection sources, but produced results much more quickly.

Using lessons learned from this experience, Ian and his team demonstrated the system to their General just before a head of state visit to Asia Pacific. They queried the social media source system and found of the 50,000 records analyzed, 15,000 warranted deeper analysis, resulting in 14 credible threats. The threats correlated well with the results from the existing systems, which took longer to compile.

Ian is looking forward to his next 18 months in post. He has no idea what missions his team will be required to support, but he has total confidence in their ability to deliver quality and timely intelligence information to his commanders.

Context

Military and civilian intelligence organisations analyse of social media interactions to understand the motivations, intent and activities of hostile groups and individuals who are a threat to public safety and / or national security.

In this – the final in my blog series on Social Business Patterns for Government – I illustrate this with the story of Ian, who uses a powerful combination of social business and analytics software to help keep his country safe.

Potential benefits

Excellent correlation with traditional collection methods

Improved time to intelligence product production

Improved team effectiveness in solving complex intelligence challenges

Solution components

IBM Connections (now discontinued, but similar to MS Teams!) handles the eCollaboration elements of this solution, enabling Ian’s team to form “scrums” to analyse Intelligence material;

a collection of IBM and partner products (including IBM Content Analyser, i2 Analyst Notebook, InfoSphere Streams, SPSS & Cognos) form the Social Media Analytics engine.

Stig is celebrating his first anniversary in two new jobs! During the past year he has spent 20% of his time working as a trainee Weapons Officer on a new class of Frigate and 80% developing leading edge software applications for Government customers.

Over a beer, Stig thinks back to where this journey began some two years ago. He had always been interested in career in the Navy, but remembers unsettled feelings when the military announced their move to a part time, professional armed forces.

But then things got interesting. During his final year at College Stig was delighted to be offered a “virtual mentor” in response to “liking” the Navy’s Facebook page. Stig quickly developed a good rapport with Julie – a junior officer in the Navy – and they chatted about how he may be able to join the military AND IBM under a new Smart Employment initiative.

Through his online chats with Julie, Stig felt well prepared for the Assessment Center – organized jointly by IBM and the military. The folks that he met were well informed about his interests and aspirations, and seemed genuinely interested in training him for a dual path career in information technology and weapons systems engineering.Stig was quick to accept the offer of TWO jobs that arrived be e-mail a few days later! No other offer of employment could possibly combine the excitement, professional challenge and opportunity to serve his Country.

Thinking back over the previous year, if anything Stig’s experience got even better! On day one, he was given instant access to training material, experts, “how to” guides etc. via the e-Collaboration system.He was surprised to find that this was accessible from his Smartphone and Tablet Computer, allowing him to progress rapidly in his training at a time and place convenient to him.

Stig built different networks to meet his various needs. It was natural to connect via the e-Collaboration system with the other members of his intake, but he was encouraged to actively participate in communities of Weapons Systems engineers and application software developers.

Stig was quick to do this, seeing this as a professional analogy to his Facebook usage. He realized enormous value from these network interactions, and they supplemented his classroom based and “on the job” training.

After a year in the job, Stig is more passionate that ever about adding most value to both his employers as soon as possible, and was sure this comprehensive, social and integrated approach to his recruiting, onboarding and career development has enabled him to do so up to now, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. Stig is very satisfied about his career choice – both of them!

Context

Governments want to identify, hire and retain the best available talent. They must also increase the effectiveness of their on-boarding activities to quickly get new hires acclimated and productive.

While almost three quarters of organisations say that employees are their number one source of economic value, some 90% of employees do not have skills to be successful! Social Networks can form the foundation for finding talent; Social networking is the number one way to attract talent, offering new employees faster time-to-value; Social business speeds on-boarding and boosts effectiveness in new role.

Potential benefits

30% more candidate searches completed annually

25% reduction in time needed to fill open positions

30% faster new hire time-to-value

At least 20% increase in employee retention

Potential first steps to realise

Use externally- and internally-facing social capabilities to connect HR staff, hiring managers and candidates in the recruiting process

Employ social capabilities to connect new hires with HR staff, direct supervisors and other new hires in the on-boarding process

Leverage internal social capabilities to connect new hires with team members and needed expertise to quickly develop productivity

Captain Nicola Verdi took up his position as Major Incident Coordinator of the Northern Police District some nine months ago when the new district was formed from four smaller units. The goal was to reduce costs, increase quality of policing and improve their ability to deal with major incidents. His team needed to deal with a variety of incidents over the past four months and Nicola is grateful for the power and flexibility of their modern crisis response system.

But it used to be so very different . . . Nicola recalls that before the merger, each district had a slightly different way of responding to a crisis.When three districts came together to tackle an unusual chemical spillage occurring on the border, their response was far from optimal and the national press at the time had a ‘field day’ at the Police’s expense.Thankfully, at the time of the police district merger the chiefs thought this through, and took advantage of the latest social media technologies to streamline the merger process and enhance their ability to respond to a crisis.

Many of Nicola’s colleagues were skeptical about the merger, stating that the majority of mergers failed to deliver the desired benefits. They were – however – pleasantly surprised with the new social intranet that was unveiled on day one by their chief, Commander Black. This gave all department members, at all levels across all physical locations easy and intuitive access to a consistent information base, ranging from a divisional contact directory through e-Learning material, to changes in procedure and legislation. Everyone could quickly buy into the Commander’s priorities for the new organisation, and could familiarise themselves with the new operational procedures. There were the inevitable “teething problems” but even the most cynical of officers agreed that the merger had gone much smoother than expected.

Nicola is most impressed with how the social intranet has revolutionised his team’s ability to respond to a crisis. In reaction to a recent unusual terrorist incident combined with a cyber attack, his Incident Manager was quickly able to pull together a team of experts who understood the specific dangers of the combined attack and provide the most effective containment measures. This was as easy as querying the social intranet with keywords defining the incident type, and contacting the most appropriate and qualified experts using the system.

Standard Operating Guidelines and Procedures were available on a tablet computer, enabling the on-site incident commander to ensure that his teams were able to follow proper procedures and interact directly with the experts using a combination of text and video chat. Hence, effectively containing and recovering from both the physical and virtual attacks.

Between incidents, Nicola noticed that his team members utilise the social intranet to form virtual communities with employees of similar interest. Nicola recently joined a Counter e-Crime community, and was surprised how much he can learn from his colleagues about the new types of threat and how best to counter them.

Context

Governments are increasingly looking to department mergers and sharing of services in response to continued budgetary pressures and to improve efficiencies through economies of scale. But failure rates on (commercial) merger activities are incredibly high, often because the vision for, and culture of, the combined entity is neither adequately considered, nor clearly communicated.

The majority of merger risks are “about people” yet 44% have leadership & communications gap and 27% lose focus on the customer / end goal. Social business transforms Leadership’s ability to communicate, connecting all resources to drive towards success.

Potential benefits

Lower integration costs attributable to reduction of task duplication

At least 20% increase in employee retention

Higher productivity and lower costs due to increased employee retention and engagement stemming from cultural alignment

Interested in following in the steps of Nicola’s employers? Here are some suggestions:

Create and leverage social network comprised of senior leadership and HR of both departments to engage on and communicate a vision for the combined entity

Use multiple social channels and tools to discuss, make decisions on and communicate specific merger actions

Leverage communities to connect the cultures and expertise of the two departments being combined.