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askSam Helps Fight Terrorism

User Story from Barry C. Collin

Senior Researcher, Institute for Security and Intelligence

Our organization studies and tracks terrorist groups and actions throughout the world, for law enforcement and the military. As such, we obtain mountains of information on people, places, ideas, and events, and have to somehow aggregate, analyze, and report, in a virtually real-time environment. This is no small task. And far more critical, it's literally a matter of life and death. My work involves all these steps, and historically, it has been nearly impossible to be effective.

All that information pouring in is unstructured. We end up with thousands of reports, bits of paper, emails, Web site URL's, audio and video tapes, etc. Until askSam, there has been no real way to manage that information, and turn it into knowledge.

askSam provides us with the tools to develop databases that can absorb all that information as fast as we can pour it in. And more importantly, derive the information we need from that ocean of data. askSam, like no other product, facilitates the logical (and sometimes, illogical) binding of data from disparate sources, resulting in ideas and analyses that could have been derived in no other way.  Certainly, there are databases out there that allow the inclusion of some free form text, but still, they require structure. And quite frankly, in the real world, structure is something you impose, not something you find. And that linear thinking allows us to miss connections -- connections that are vital to any enterprise. askSam is the first "real world" intelligence product I have ever used.  And will continue to use.

I used to measure my work in "month/feet." That is, how many months of materials were piled on my desk, and how many feet thick the mess was. I was not being effective, and decisive analysis was not the norm. Today, with askSam, information is uploaded as quickly as I receive it, and my analyses are almost instantaneous. Easier, faster, more efficient -- there are few positive words that describe productivity, and more importantly, effectivity, that could not describe our use of askSam.

We took a chance when we choose askSam; sometimes you have to. There were other names out there, and we looked, but none offered the real-world model we were looking for. So we installed askSam, threw everything we had at it, right out of the box, and we have never looked back since. We found that other programs are based on the assumption of "like information."  And there is application for that. But for turning information into knowledge, there was no other program that could as easily handle the variety of information we encountered. We tried the competitors, and I'm certain they have their place. But our system is about as mission critical as you can get. And askSam is the only database that lives on the system.

I would recommend askSam to anyone who gets more information, more data, from more sources, in more forms, at a rate faster than they can manage -- which is just about all of us. For the Institute, we did not have to use the exceptionally powerful customization available with askSam. But we may tomorrow. Anyone who has responsibility for bringing order to a chaotic world, who is charged with turning information into knowledge, or who is chartered with turning a blur into a focused snapshot, should bring askSam into their work today. Before we move to measuring work in "years/yards"!

Barry C. Collin

Senior Researcher

Institute for Security and Intelligence

CyberTerrorism, Computer Crime, and Information Warfare

A Non-Profit Research Organization

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