Surfing the Data Tidal Wave: Risk Intelligence Moving from Analog to Digital

Back in the day, embedded intelligence teams worked with few resources, limited budget, and little to no technology. They had their art and their science. They had a process, but never called it a workflow. Their data was captured through face-to-face interviews, phone and post it notes.

Now we have human and digital sensors and a tidal wave of data. Technology must be involved at a scale we never imagined… back in the day.

We asked Tom Kopecky, who bookended both the analog world and the digital in investigative intelligence, to take us through this evolution, break it down for us, and provide us some thoughts on where it goes next and why. What we found is the new technology is bridging the old organizational silos, the technology silos, and the communication silos that have kept us from the promise of proactive and protective intelligence. As well, it is opening the door to non-intelligence personnel through its guided workflows and multi-modal communications.

Tom was a founder of IRC Intelligence & Fortis Protective Services, both boutique security intelligence firms with offices located in Chicago & Austin, where he helped clients coordinate threat assessment investigations and develop their protective intelligence programs. He and his team were constantly searching for more optimized approaches to create more insights in the protective intelligence workflow. He eventually decided to build his own as the co-founder of Ontic Technologies.