Range Sheep
¶ I wrote this about four years ago now, and had forgotten about it until recently. I was asked at the time how a biosurveillance organization/entity could improve information collection and increase the relevance of reporting for the consumer base. In analyzing the various biosurveillance programs in operation at the time, I realized a key element missing (or in some cases, not adequately developed) was a concerted effort at targeting (both internal and external). I think it is still pertinent today, not only in the biosurveillance arena, but in many operational realms globally. Therefore, I thought I would put it out there.
Technology Enabled Targeting and Analysis
¶ What is targeting? The term has been used across multiple disciplines (e.g. military, marketing, environmental conservation, sales, etc.) to define various approaches to identify, locate, and gain access to information, locations, or persons of value to a particular discipline. In these instances, the targeting methodology utilized is generally highly specialized toward the particular industry, customer base, or mission, and is outwardly focused and product-oriented. A representative exemplar of this targeting approach is illustrated through the following definition: ‘the process of selecting targets and matching the appropriate response or message to them, taking into account the operational requirements, capabilities, and resources of the customer’. While this has become the traditional conceptualization of ‘targeting’, we opted to develop and operationalize a more holistic methodology to targeting for use by biosurveillance organizations, which encompasses both externally- and internally-focused analyses of organizational process, decision modeling, requirements generation, source identification, data assessment, and taxonomy development.
¶ The key to effective targeting is to know one’s own processes, capabilities, resources, and weaknesses while simultaneously analyzing and understanding these same qualities in the organizations that will be using the information (customers); this is a time-consuming and difficult task, however, it significantly increases the relevance and timeliness of reporting. In general, most individuals have an intuitive understanding of their specific job function and how their tasks fit into the organization’s overall mission, however, very few have truly conducted a holistic analysis of the organization, or even their division within the particular entity. At the core of our holistic approach is the belief that every organization is like a living organism; knowing individual properties or processes of the organism is not sufficient, one must understand how they interact with one another to ensure optimal functioning of the whole.
Source: vethno
¶ The concept of Technology Enabled Targeting and Analysis (TETA) is not a new one, although, in recent years the trend has been shifting from the use of technology to enable the analyst to seeking out technology to replace human analytic functions. In our approach, we posit that the human element is critical to development of a robust, effective, and near real-time biosurveillance monitoring capability and that technology should be selected which enhances the core functionality of the human analysts while simultaneously automating functions that are generally time consuming when conducted manually (e.g. data processing and input). The core function of a biosurveillance professional is analysis of reporting, therefore, if one spends the majority of time searching for relevant sources and reports and subsequently processing raw data, there remains little time for true analysis of developing events. In the TETA approach, we seek to alter the time constraints on the analysts through incorporation of technology that assists with these manually intensive tasks, thereby providing the analyst more opportunity to conduct his analysis and other critical functions; overall, the investment in this type of technology saves both time and money and allows the analytical requirements to be conducted by fewer, highly talented individuals. So, one may ask why this is considered a relevant aspect of targeting? In the holistic targeting approach, we regard both human and technological factors as key components in a process-oriented analysis. It should again be noted that every aspect of holistic targeting is applied to internal processes of the biosurveillance entity, its external interactions, and the associated internal processes of customer organizations. Read the full article…
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