Make short work of complex investigations

How one analytics solution is transforming investigation effectiveness

Making a positive impact on the citizens you serve, while using resources more effectively is a continuing government theme. One service now allows you to conduct and manage investigations more effectively, working quickly and collaboratively with a much wider range of intelligence sources and colleagues.

Preventing benefit fraud, detecting the changing activities of criminal networks, or uncovering the health and social care interventions that work best for various citizen groups – all require cross-departmental collaboration. However, sifting through tons of quantitative and qualitative information to find causes, patterns and effects is simply too costly and time-consuming for investigators to do manually.

This is why SAS Visual Investigator has been specifically designed for organisations whose intelligence analysts are battling increased complexity in the kinds of questions they need to answer, the cases they are undertaking, and the data they have available.

Without any coding or statistical analysis skills, people at all levels within your organisation can interrogate multiple sources of unconnected, up-to-date data to get a holistic view of people, relationships, networks, patterns, events, trends and anomalies.

Think about the difference this could make to understanding how networks of criminals are trafficking women, children, weapons, and drugs. Or how successful interventions taken at individual citizen level could be better understood in order to scale them up to the policy level. With just a single interface, intelligence analysts, investigators and case workers can build, gather and explore all available information relevant to their interest area. They can collate a case file, capturing visualisations of their data alongside their notes and even images, and then create a workflow to ensure that information and next actions are undertaken in a time-bound fashion by colleagues. All of which equates to getting more done, faster and with reporting that meets the needs of auditors.

Get ahead and stay ahead
What this will allow your team to do is really get ahead of the game – spot emerging issues and new trends, even changing criminal behaviour and tactics, all of which can be passed on to policy and budget teams. Any suspicious behaviour that you or your colleagues need to know about and act on is prioritised, meaning that they will spend more time being effective.

Investigating the real world
In North Carolina, SAS is helping Hanover County to better understand the risks to children of neglect and abuse in order to break these cycles, using law enforcement, healthcare and welfare data.