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.
Holistic Targeting
¶ As mentioned previously, in the biosurveillance context, holistic targeting is the analysis of all aspects of an organization’s internal operations coupled with similar, external analyses of customer-specific operational requirements, internal processes, decision-making, and independent data sources. This integration of internal and external processes ensures the customer receives pertinent and timely reporting of biological events. Ideally, this holistic method should be applied to the biosurveillance operation initially, then once its operations are optimized, should then be applied independently to its various customers.
¶ In general, targeting lies at the core of the biosurveillance reporting cycle, both driving initial collection as well as providing a mechanism for continued refinement of reporting, source acquisition and validation, and identification of gaps in reporting. Further, it is a continually evolving process that provides critical infrastructure to the reporting cycle, yet is flexible enough to enable customer feedback and regular refinement of operations. Therefore, as presented in the figure below, targeting provides direct input to collection efforts and dissemination of reporting, while simultaneously optimizing biosurveillance operations through refinement of collection methodology, analysis, and acquisition of customer feedback.
¶ The initial focus of the holistic targeting methodology is detailing the organization’s internal operational processes and decision-making structure. This is captured through identifying individuals’ responsibilities within the organization and how they integrate into the organizational structure and operational capabilities of the unit. Thereafter, successive iterations of this analysis at the section, division, and organizational level will fully identify how each element within the corporate ‘organism’ operates and interacts. From this initial template, various scenarios can be constructed and presented to each entity within the organization to capture decision-making processes under varying conditions, internal stop-gaps and trigger points in reporting and response, and identification of individuals, units, or data sources that are critical to mission function of the organization. As with all detailed targeting efforts, this step is time intensive and, in many cases, may take several iterations to truly capture the processes and decision model used by the organization. There is a tendency for individuals to initially present what they see as the ideal situation instead of how the organization truly operates. Therefore, it must be made clear up-front that the entire targeting approach is not a judgmental critique of the organization; instead, it is merely used to model how the organization operates in order to understand how to best integrate reporting, data sets, etc. However, it is not uncommon (and from our perspective encouraged) for organizations to use this initial template to refine their operations.
¶ In addition to process and decision modeling, the next critical targeting focus is on specific topics of interest in biosurveillance and corresponding development of relevant taxonomies composed of indications and warnings (I&Ws) of biological events, based on social disruption, animal, human, and crop disease models. Historic case studies relevant to human, animal, and crop disease must be identified and analyzed in-depth to determine corresponding indications and warnings. This is a structured and time consuming endeavor, which is critical to continued targeting efforts, development of initial reporting requirements, and a key to successful biosurveillance monitoring. Further, continued evaluation of indications and warnings from historic case studies allows ongoing refinement of reporting tailored to customer requirements. This procedure is somewhat flexible however, and can be accomplished either in a fully manual method or enable through the use of technology. Additionally, depending on operational requirements, manpower, and funding situation, taxonomy development can be done in a stepwise or measured manner in the short-, medium-, and long-term. The biosurveillance organization uses customer reporting requirements and priorities to stage the development of the taxonomies; however, due to the evolving targeting process, case studies that focus on lower priority requirements should already be identified so that they can be investigated as resources become available.
¶ A clear picture of internal and external capabilities of the biosurveillance organization will soon emerge from the process/decision modeling and taxonomy creation. This initial effort will ensure that subsequent steps in the targeting process are built on a solid foundation, where the organization fully understands its own methodology and requirements, as well as that of its initial customer base. It should be highlighted once again how the targeting process is a dynamic and ever-evolving situation that provides continual feedback and refinement to a biosurveillance organization and its customers. With these factors in mind, the organization can next develop a collection strategy and begin to identify potential sources of information. This is again a fluid process where sources of biosurveillance information will be identified, evaluated, used for a time, and eventually dropped; sources have a lifecycle, whether they are media-based, technology-centric, sensors, imagery, human, etc.
¶ What drives source generation and why is this an ever-changing management challenge? At the basest level, customer reporting requirements and the capabilities of the biosurveillance organization drive source generation; as these factors change over time, source types, locations, and reporting will correspondingly shift. The biosurveillance entity should constantly strive to identify better sources of information with different collection capabilities; this broad-spectrum approach assists the organization with corroboration of reporting. In other words, if there are local media reports from eastern Africa of Rift Valley Fever and corresponding reports of influenza-like illness and meningitis in humans, use of reporting from on-the-ground human sources and imagery showing flooding in the area will assist with corroborating the initial media report as well as provide a more robust picture of the ongoing event. Such redundant mechanisms will also provide the organization an ability to obtain reporting across a broader range of locations and situations; if there is a gap in reporting from one type of source in a region, other monitoring methods can be used to at least obtain some measure of coverage in the region.
¶ Primary challenges in collection/source management are identification of reporting across several different regions and continually evaluating sources to identify gaps in that reporting. Source bias can also come into effect and significantly alter reporting quality, which is why we advocate TETA; technology cannot identify, monitor, and correct for such bias, but humans, enabled by technology, are quite effective. For instance, media sources will, in many cases, have a trend or bias in reporting depending on funding source, political agenda, etc., which must be identified, monitored, and compared to other sources by an analyst over time. Building a solid and reliable reporting base takes time and effort, however, if good, methodical targeting of sources is conducted base upon reporting requirements, the time invested in this approach will provide a much more robust reporting capability and broader reporting coverage.
¶ The holistic targeting approach can be thought of as a circular feedback loop where initial targeting efforts drive collection, analysis, and dissemination, all of which feed back into the targeting process to continually refine the biosurveillance organization’s internal and external operational processes. Technology can enhance this process by providing the analysts various time-saving, information processing, and visualization tools that not only add to the robustness of analysis and reporting, but also provide for an enhanced capability to identify reporting gaps, trends in reporting, and cross-indexing of sourcing to specific indications and warnings. With suitable enabling technology, a developing biological event can now be more robustly analyzed across socio-economic, spatial, and temporal factors in near real-time. A useful analogy can be made between TETA and geospatial visualization technology and spatial statistics; an analyst may not be able to identify clusters or clustering of disease from raw data, however, with geospatial software tools, such identification becomes quickly and readily available. Therefore, the taxonomies developed for animal, human, and crop disease, coupled with customer requirements, drive source identification and collection management. In turn, the information obtained from the various sources drives overall analysis, refinement of collection and requirements, with the overall goal of increased timeliness, validity, and specificity of reporting.
¶ Holistic targeting provides a robust infrastructure and methodological approach to development of a near real-time, reliable biosurveillance capability. The previous description of TETA is meant provide a general overview of the methodology and is not meant to provide a detailed process-map of the technique. Each organization is going to be different in its approach depending on a multitude of factors associated with its individual capabilities, customer base, requirements, etc. However, a concerted and holistic targeting approach benefits any organization, be it a biosurveillance entity, local Department of Public Health, Agriculture, Emergency Response, or even a separate commercial entity. In the biosurveillance community, holistic targeting is critical to mission success and ensures broad applicability of the reporting to a variety of users.
