K2 Global Consulting

Information, information everywhere and not a drop to…

In my previous post, I touched on the evolution of the investigations industry, specifically the ways in which the Internet, by making so much information readily available, presents a certain kind of challenge to investigative professionals. Pre-Internet, the challenge was finding information; now, the challenge is sorting through it, deciding when you have enough, and determining what is good, bad, useful or distracting. We in the investigative and business intelligence sector are great at discovering information about people, companies, groups and organizations, but what separates good investigators from the pack is the ability to filter, focus, and stay on track.

My years of investigative experience have taught me that one of the most important ways to start a case is to set concrete goals. It seems obvious, but sitting down with your team and defining what you’re really looking for up front is vital to the success of a case. This discipline is particularly important nowadays, when search engines are so important to our process but inevitably suggest words and phrases that threaten to send investigators off in different directions and on unpredictable tangents. (It’s about to get harder, too: Google’s latest “real-time”search technology, while impressive and useful, has the potential to be hazardously distracting. Every letter you type reveals a new set of results, so by the time you’ve typed “John Smith”, you’ve had to avoid clicking on links about Jet Blue, Jones Beach, John Mayer, Jon Stewart, and Captain John Smith.)

Ok, I know — exploring those tangents and wandering off in different directions does get interesting at times, but we will talk about that in another post. Bottom line: if you don’t spend some time talking and thinking about search parameters and investigative goals, you may be unpleasantly surprised with the results.

The first filter we apply as results start to flood in is an analysis of sources – for example, we might glean some information about a subject’s business from Facebook, but it probably won’t be as reliable (hence as valuable) as a set of online SEC filings. In other cases, the opposite might be true.

We also need to question the information provider’s motivation. Who provided the data, and when? What was the ostensible purpose? This is not to say that you should discount apparently biased or distorted information — you just need to look at it more closely because it adds to the context of your search.

Even authoritative sources can lead to “false positives”, or complementary results that create the illusion of substantiation. In many cases, several independent sources will seem to separately confirm a piece of information, when in fact they have both relied on a single primary source. (Think about two news sites that base breaking news articles on the same erroneous wire report.) That’s why we at K2 Global spend so much time on deep analysis — it’s the only way to turn an ever-increasing abundance of raw information into useful knowledge.