Watch Anti-Money Laundering Compliances Sink
September 25, 2015
With a title like “AML-A Challenge Of Titanic Proportions” posted on Attivio metaphoric comparisons between the “ship of dreams” and icebergs is inevitable. Anti-money laundering compliances have seen an unprecedented growth between 2011-2014 of 53%, says KPMG’s Global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Survey. The costs are predicted to increase by more than 25% in the next three years. The biggest areas that are requiring more money, include transaction monitoring systems, Know Your Customer systems, and recruitment/retention systems for AML staff.
The Titanic metaphor plays in as the White Star Line director Bruce Ismay, builder Thomas Andrew, and nearly all of the 3327 passengers believed the ship was unsinkable and the pinnacle of modern technology. The belief that humanity’s efforts would conquer Mother Nature was its downfall. The White Star Line did not prepare the Titanic for disaster, but AML companies are trying to prevent their ships are sinking. Except they cannot account for all the ways thieves can work around their system, just as the Titanic could not avoid the iceberg.
“Systems need to be smarter – even capable of learning patterns of transaction and ownership. Staff needs more productive ways of investigating and positively concluding their caseload. Alerting methods need to generate fewer ‘false positives’ – reducing the need for costly human investigation. New sources of information that can provide evidence need to come online faster and quickly correlate with existing data sources.”
The Titanic crew accidentally left the binoculars for the crow’s nest in England, which did not help the lookouts. The current AML solutions are like the forgotten binoculars and pervasive action needs to be taken to avoid the AML iceberg.
Whitney Grace, September 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Rundown on Legal Knowledge Management
September 24, 2015
One of the new legal buzzwords is knowledge management and not just old-fashioned knowledge management, but rather quick, efficient, and effective. Time is an expensive commodity for legal professionals, especially with the amount of data they have to sift through for cases. Mondaq explains the importance of knowledge management for law professionals in the article, “United States: A Brief Overview Of Legal Knowledge Management.”
Knowledge management first started in creating an effective process for managing, locating, and searching relevant files, but it quickly evolved into implementing a document managements system. While knowledge management companies offered law practices decent document management software to tackle the data hill, an even bigger problem arose. The law practices needed a dedicated person to be software experts:
“Consequently, KM emphasis had to shift from finding documents to finding experts. The expert could both identify useful documents and explain their context and use. Early expertise location efforts relied primarily on self-rating. These attempts almost always failed because lawyers would not participate and, if they did, they typically under- or over-rated themselves.”
The biggest problem law professional face is that they might invest a small fortune in a document management license, but they do not know how to use the software or do not have the time to learn. It is a reminder that someone might have all the knowledge and best tools at their fingertips, but unless people have the knowledge on how to use and access it, the knowledge is useless.
Whitney Grace, September 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Baffled When Choosing Business Intelligence Analytics Tools?
September 23, 2015
Most of the professionals whom I know use one software package for most of their business intelligence needs. What do you use? SAS, SPSS, raw algorithms from Mertler’s and Vannatta’s Advanced and Multivariate Statistical Methods, Diffeo, Mathematica, or some other tool?
The answer, gentle reader, is Excel. Yep, the son of 1-2-3 by way of ruled ledger paper.
I read “Which BI Analytics Tool Does My Company Need?” and figured out the angle of attack after a couple of paragraphs. Here’s the tip off:
BI analytics tools. No one-size-fits-all.
Excel, however, comes pretty close to the horseshoe stake. The reasons include:
- It is not particularly intimidating. Anyone can plug in numbers, select a numerical recipe, and get an output
- Excel is available widely
- Students get some exposure in school, usually before high school, even in rural Kentucky.
The write up does not identify specific vendors or products. The article is a useful collection of jargon:
- Visual oriented analytics. Translation: graphs
- Packaged applications. Translation: Excel
- Limited exploration. Translation: Canned reports set up for the user by the developer
- Operational snapshots: Translation: More canned reports.
My thought: Isn’t analytics based business intelligence easy? I have observed Excel users’ selecting numerical recipes from the “formulas” provided with Excel and seeing what happens when applied to a collection of data. How does that work out in your experience?
Business intelligence may be considered an oxymoron by some.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2015
Exalead Gets a New Application
September 22, 2015
Exalead is Dassault Systems’s big data software targeted specifically at businesses. Exalead offers innovative data discovery and analytics solutions to manage information in real time across various servers and generate insightful reports to make better, faster decisions. It is the big data solution of choice for many businesses across various industries. The Exalead blog shares that “PricewaterhouseCoopers Is Launching Its Information Management Application, Based on Exalead CloudView.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) analyzed the amount of time users spent trying to locate, organize, and disseminated information. When users spend the time on information management, they lose two valuable resources: time and money. PwC designed Pulse, a search and information tool as a solution to the problem.
“The EXALEAD CloudView software solution from Dassault Systèmes facilitates the rapid search and use of sources of structured and unstructured information. In existence since 2007, this enterprise information management concept was integrated initially in other software applications. Since it was reworked as EXALEAD CloudView, the configuration of the queries has become easier and they are processed much faster. Furthermore, the results of the searches are more precise, significantly reducing the number of duplicates and the time wasted managing them. PwC has deliberately decided to roll out Pulse on an international scale gradually, in order to generate plenty of enthusiasm amongst users. A business case is prepared for each country on the basis of its needs, the benefits and the potential savings. PwC also intends to make the content in Pulse accessible by other internal systems (e.g., the project workspaces), to integrate the sources, and to make the search function even smarter.”
Pulse is supposed to cut costs and reinvest the resources into more fruitful venues. One interesting aspect to note is that PwC did not build the Pulse upgrade, Exalead provided the plumbing.
Whitney Grace, September 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Recommind Hits $70 Million
September 16, 2015
A video from the Big Data Landscape, part of their Big Data TV series, brings us an interview with Recommind’s CEO, Bob Tennant. The 11-and-a-half minute video and its transcript appear under the headline, “How Recommind Grew to $70M in Big Data Revenue.”
The interview by Dave Feinleib explores Recommind’s right-moves-at-the-right-time origin story, what its intelligence and eDiscovery software does, and why Tennant is confident the company will continue to thrive. This successful CEO also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in any field, so check out the video or transcript for those words of wisdom.
Interestingly, the technology Tennant describes reminds us of early Autonomy methods [pdf]. He discusses working with unstructured data:
“So what you have to do is try to understand at a deeper level what’s happening semantically. What Recommind does is marry up a very highly scalable system for dealing with unstructured information– and the kind of database you need for doing that is different than what you would utilize for online transaction processing. But it also marries that up with a very deep knowledge of machine learning, which is the root of the company and where our post-docs were doing their research, to help understand what the key pieces of information in the sea of textual stuff are. And once you understand the key pieces, then you can put that into applications for further use or you can provide it to business intelligence applications to make sense of, or you can feed it elsewhere. But that’s very different from dealing with very structured data that most people are familiar with.”
Launched in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, Recommind provides search-powered analysis and governance solutions to customers around the world. The company’s Malolo technology stack is built upon their CORE information management platform.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
SEC Cracks Down on News Release Interceptors
September 15, 2015
What’s better than a flash trade? I would suggest perusing news releases before the news releases are released. “SEC Takes $30m Pound of Flesh in Newswire-Hacking Scandal” reveals that the US Securities and Exchange Commission frowns on “trading on info swiped from press releases before they were made public.”
The write up reveals:
According to the SEC, two Ukrainian hackers compromised the wire services and then fed the stolen information to dozens of investors who made illegal (and highly lucrative) trades. The defendants are accused of violating the US Securities Act and the US Exchange Act.
Interesting. Will the SEC expand its crusade to ensure that news releases remain off limits to those who would exploit the financial system?
My hunch is that Martha Stewart type investigations and prosecutions are more appealing to some enforcement outfits. I have heard that there is a revolving door between certain financial outfits and US government positions. Chasing Ukrainians does not modify standard operating procedures. Do I have a pending folder named “hold ‘er”? I will check.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2015
The Cricket Cognitive Analysis
September 4, 2015
While Americans scratch their heads at the sport cricket, it has a huge fanbase and not only that, there are mounds of data that can now be fully analyzed says First Post in the article, “The Intersection Of Analytics, Social Media, And Cricket In The Cognitive Era Of Computing.”
According to the article, cricket fans absorb every little bit of information about their favorite players and teams. Technology advances have allowed the cricket players to improve their game with better equipment and ways to analyze their playing, in turn the fans have a deeper personal connection with the game as this information is released. For the upcoming Cricket World Cup, Wisden India will provide all the data points for the game and feed them into IBM’s Analytics Engine to improve the game for spectators and the players.
Social media is a huge part of the cricket experience and the article details examples about how it platforms like Twitter are processed through sentimental analysis and IBM Text Analytics.
“What is most interesting to businesses however is that observing these campaigns help in understanding the consumer sentiment to drive sales initiatives. With right business insights in the nick of time, in line with social trends, several brands have come up with lucrative offers one can’t refuse. In earlier days, this kind of marketing required pumping in of a lot of money and waiting for several weeks before one could analyze and approve the commercial success of a business idea. With tools like IBM Analytics at hand, one can not only grab the data needed, assess it so it makes a business sense, but also anticipate the market response.”
While Cricket might be what the article concentrates on, imagine how data analytics are being applied to other popular sports such as American football, soccer, baseball, golf, and the variety of racing popular around the world.
Whitney Grace, September 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Oracle Suggests a PeopleSoft Upgrade
September 2, 2015
PeopleSoft is a popular human resources management software and like all software it occasionally needs to be upgraded. TriCore Solutions suggests that instead of using Verity, your next upgrade to PeopleSoft should be the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES). TriCore Solutions brags about helping clients upgrade to SES in the article, “Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) And PeopleSoft 9.2.”
Oracle SES offers a secure, high-quality search across all enterprise platforms as well as analytics, intuitive search interface, secure crawling, indexing, and searching. When SES is deployed into an enterprise system it also offers several key capabilities:
- “Connectivity to Legacy Repositories. SES allows companies to access their most valuable assets – information about its specific business, its processes, products, customers, and documents that previously resided in proprietary repositories. Connectors include interfaces for EMC Documentum, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Notes, Oracle‘s E-Business Suite and Oracle Siebel among others.
- Security: The ability to search password protected sources securely. Oracle‘s search technology provides single-sign-on (SSO) based security where available, and can also employ application-specific security where SSO is not available.
- High quality search results: Brings for the Intranet a high level of relevance that users associate with Internet searches.
- Going beyond keywords. As the volume of information grows, users need advanced search techniques like the ability to categorize and cluster search results for iterative navigation.”
It is evident that Oracle SES offers a comprehensive search feature to PeopleSoft and maybe a better product, but what does Verity have to offer?
Whitney Grace, September 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bank Exports IT to India
September 1, 2015
Computer World’s article, “As It Sets IT Layoffs, Citizens Bank Shifts Work To India Via Web” sounds like it should have been published five years ago. It was not that long ago when Americans were in an uproar about jobs being outsourced to China and India, but many of those jobs have returned to the US or replaced with an alternative. Despite falling out of interest with the mainstream media, jobs are still being outsourced to Asia. Citizens Bank is having their current IT employees train their replacements in a “knowledge transfer” and they will be terminated come December.
Citizens Bank signed a five-year services contract with IBM for IT services. IBM owns a large scale IT services company in India, which pays its workers a fraction of the current Citizens Bank IT workers.
As one can imagine, the Citizens Bank employees are in an uproar:
“The number of layoffs is in dispute. Employees said as many as 150 Citizen Bank IT workers were being laid off. But this number doesn’t include contractors. IBM will be consolidating the bank’s IT infrastructure services, and, as part of that, the bank is consolidating from four vendors to one vendor, IBM. This change will result in the elimination of some contractor jobs, and when contractors are added, the total layoff estimate by employees ranges from 250 to 350.”
It is reported that some IT workers are being offered comparable positions with IBM, while others are first in line for jobs in other branches of Citizens Bank. However, the IBM jobs appear to be short term and the other bank jobs do not appear to be turning up.
Other companies are shifting their IT work overseas much to the displeasure of IT workers, who thought they would be assured job security for the rest of their lives. IT workers place the blame on companies wanting to increase profits and not caring about their employees. What is going on with Citizens Bank and other companies is not new. It has been going on for decades, but that does not make the harm to Americans any less.
Whitney Grace, September 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Data Vendors Don’t Understand Big Data
August 27, 2015
Sit back and absorb this article’s title for a moment: big data vendors don’t understand big data. How can IT vendors not understand one of the IT industry’s largest selling products? According to Computing, “SAP, Oracle, and HP ‘Don’t Get’ Big Data, Claims Massive Analytic Chairman” in a very bold statement.
Executive chairman and founder of the Oscar AP platform George Frangou claims that companies that like Oracle, HP, and SAP do not know how to help their customers take advantage of their big data and are more interested in getting customers hooked into their ecosystems than providing true analytical insight.
One of the reasons Frangou says this is because his Oscar AP is more “advanced” and allows users to foretell the future with various outcomes. The Oscar AP platform is part of the next round of big data called massive analytics. HP, Oracle, and SAP cannot wrap their heads around massive analytics yet, because they are more concerned with selling their product.
“Because of this, Frangou said Massive Analytic is ‘quite unashamedly following a displacement strategy to displace the incumbents because they’re not getting it.’ He added that SAP HANA, Oracle Exalytics and HP Haven are essentially the same product because they’re built on the same base code.”
Frangou went on to say that big data customers are spending more money than they need to and are getting sucked into purchasing more products in order to make their big data plans work. It appears to be a vicious cycle. Frangou said that cloud analytics are the best option for customers and to go with SAP, although still more barriers remain getting a decent cloud analytics platform off the ground.
It does not come as surprising that big data products are falling short of their promised results. A similar comparison would be the Windows OS falling well below expected desired performance expectations and users spending way too much time troubleshooting than getting their projects done.
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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