Read Chloe’s Q&A from the panel session, ‘Challenges and opportunities facing SMEs in the security and public safety sectors’, below:

What made you want to join the forum?

For starters, techUK is always a pleasure to work with – my colleagues and I at Datactics have several contacts at techUK that we speak with regularly and it’s clear that they care about the work they’re doing. It never feels like a courtesy call – you always come away with valuable actions to follow up on. Having had such positive experiences with techUK before, I felt encouraged to join the Security and Public Safety SME forum. Being a part of the Security and Public Safety SME Forum is exciting- you’re in a room full of like-minded people who want to make a difference. 

What are your main hopes and expectations from the forum?

I’ve previously participated in techUK events where senior stakeholders from government departments have led open and honest conversations about gaps in their knowledge. It’s refreshing to see them hold their hands up and say ‘We need help and we want to hear from SMEs’.

I think it would be great to see more of this in the Security and Public Safety SME forum, with people not being afraid to ask for help and demonstrating a desire to make a change.

What are, in your opinion, the main challenges faced by the SME community in the security and public safety sectors?

One of the challenges we face as SMEs is that we have to be deliberate about the work we do. We might see an opportunity that we know we’re a good fit for, but before we can commit, we need to think about it more than just ‘do we fit the technical criteria?’ We need to think about how it’s going to affect wider aspects of the company – Do we have sufficient staffing? Do they need security clearance? What is the delivery timeline?

If we aren’t being intentional, we risk disrupting our current way of working. We have a loyal and happy customer base and an excellent team of engineers, developers, and PMs to manage and support them, but even if a brilliant data quality deal lands on our desk, if it would take an army to deliver it, we may not be able to commit the same resources that a big consultancy firm can and, ultimately, we may have to pass on it.  

Moreover, our expertise lies specifically in data quality. As a leading DQ vendor, we excel in this area. However, if a project requires both data quality and additional data management services, we may not be the most suitable candidate, despite being the best at delivering the data quality component.

What are your top 3 areas of focus that the forum should address?

Ultimately, I think the goal of this forum should be steered by asking the question ‘How do we make people feel safe’?

A big challenge is always going to be striking the balance between tackling the issues that affect people’s safety, whilst navigating those bigger ‘headline’ stories that can have a lasting effect on the public. For instance, if you google ‘Is the UK a safe place to live?’, largely speaking the answers will say that ‘yes, the UK is a very safe place to live’. However, people’s perceptions don’t always align with that. I remember reading an article last year about how public trust in police has fallen to the lowest levels ever, so I think that would be a good place to start.  

From a member’s perspective though, more selfishly, I’d like to get the following out of the forum – 

• Access to more SME opportunities 

• Greater partnership opportunities 

• More insights into procurement and access to the market 

In your opinion, why is networking and collaboration so important? Have you any success stories to share?

Our biggest success in networking and collaboration is having so many customers willing to endorse us and share our joint achievements.

We focus on understanding our customers, learning how they use our product, and listening to their likes and dislikes. This feedback shapes our roadmap and shows customers how much we value their input. This approach not only creates satisfied customers, but also turns them into advocates for our product. They mention us at conferences, in speeches, and in reference requests, and even help other customers with their data management strategies.

For us, networking is about more than just making new contacts; it’s about helping our customers connect and build relationships. Our customers’ advocacy is incredibly valuable because prospective customers like to hear success stories from them, perhaps more than salespeople.

About Datactics

Datactics specialises in data quality solutions for security and public safety. Using advanced data matching, cleansing, and validation, we help law enforcement and public safety agencies manage and analyse large datasets. This ensures critical information is accurate and accessible, improving response times, reducing errors, and protecting communities from threats.

For more information on how we support security and public safety services, visit our GovTech and Policing page, or reach out to us via our contact us page.

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Belfast, Northern Ireland – 5th April, 2024 – Datactics, a leading provider of data quality and matching software, has been recognised in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Augmented Data Quality Solutions for a third year running.  

Gartner included only 13 data quality vendors in the report, where Datactics is named a Niche Player. Datactics’ Augmented Data Quality platform (ADQ) offers a unified and user-friendly experience, optimising data quality management and improving operational efficiencies. By augmenting data quality processes with advanced AI and machine learning techniques, such as outlier detection, bulk remediation, and rule suggestion, Datactics serves customers across highly regulated industries, including financial services and government.

In an era where messy, unreliable and inaccurate data poses a substantial threat to organisations, the demand for data quality solutions has never been greater. Datactics stands out for its user-friendly, scalable, and highly efficient data quality solutions, designed to empower business users to manage and improve data quality seamlessly. Its solutions leverage AI and machine learning to automate complex data management tasks, thereby significantly enhancing operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making across various industries. 

“We are thrilled to be included in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Augmented Data Quality Solutions,” said Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics. “Our team’s dedication and innovative approach is solving the complex challenges of practical data quality for customers across industries.

We believe the report significantly highlights our distinction from traditional observability solutions, showcasing Datactics’ focus on identifying, measuring and remediating broken data. We are committed to assisting our clients to create clean, ready-to-use data via the latest techniques in AI and have invested heavily in automation to reduce the manual effort required in rule building and management while retaining human-in-the-loop supervision. It is gratifying to note that Gartner recognises Datactics for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.”

Datactics’ solutions are designed to empower data leaders to trust their data for critical decision-making and regulatory compliance. For organisations looking to enhance their data quality and leverage the power of augmented data management, Datactics offers a proven platform that stands out for its ease of use, flexibility, and comprehensive support. 

Magic Quadrant reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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This innovative solution makes faster and more efficient AI-powered data quality accessible and beneficial to all, through an enriched user interface and more expansive implementation of machine learning functions throughout.

ADQ covers the full spectrum of end-to-end data quality management. The platform provides data profiling, cleaning, matching, and remediation without the need for coding, and leverages the power of AI to provide meaningful data quality insights on data breaks, causes, and detecting outliers.

In today’s data-driven world, enterprises face the challenge of maintaining high-quality data across the organisation and ensuring that critical data is easily accessible to governance professionals. ADQ eliminates potential delays in data remediation workflows by using greater automation and no-code tooling, thereby reducing manual effort and increasing accuracy.

ADQ seamlessly integrates with data catalogues and lineage systems such as Alation and Solidatus, accommodating both cloud-only and hybrid data architectures. This interoperability ensures that customer data management ecosystems remain harmonious and efficient.

The release of ADQ unveils a range of machine learning extensions that will allow customers of Datactics to deliver data quality improvements faster, more efficiently, and with maximum business impact. Users will benefit from improved profiling, including outlier detection and automated rule suggestion. Additionally, ADQ includes a new feature called ‘Insights Hub’ which allows customers to benefit from the long histories of data quality ‘break/fix’ activities and to perform analysis into which remediations are having the most substantial business impact.

Datactics CEO Stuart Harvey says,

“ADQ makes use of the power of machine learning in a very practical way that will help a data governance professional do their job faster and better. ADQ can improve data quality time to value for an analyst struggling to choose the most efficient rules for complex data via automated rule suggestion.

Likewise, having created rules to measure and remediate broken data, ADQ can be used to further root cause analysis by understanding whether data quality improvements are making a difference over time. All of this can be done without deep technical expertise on behalf of the ADQ user. We have several international clients already using the system live, and we look forward to rolling out to new and existing customers throughout 2023 and into 2024.”

For further information about Datactics’ latest innovation, please visit www.datactics.com or read more in a recent article by the A-Team 

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June 2022 was a significant milestone in the timeline of LGBTQ+ rights in the UK. Not only was it Pride Month, but this year marked the 50th anniversary of the first Pride event to be held in the UK. Back in 1972, the parade in London attracted around 2,000 participants, whereas over 1.5 million people were expected to visit the city for this year’s parade. This in itself is worthy of a blog post, as Datactics prides itself on the diversity of its workforce and the inclusivity within our growing teams. However not only is this a cause which we can all support, but analysing crimes against this demographic is something in which we are actively engaged on a daily basis.  All too frequently we hear about news of attacks on members of the LGBTQ+ community: physical attacks on individuals, offensive content posted online, vandalism to property and so on. As much as we’d like to think that we’re a more tolerant society than we used to be, unfortunately the data suggests otherwise. Recorded hate crimes motivated against a person’s sexual orientation have increased every year from 2016.^[1] 

So where does Datactics come in, and what difference are we making? 

Firstly, let me speak bluntly. We’re not on the front line pursuing offenders or supporting victims. This responsibility lies with a wide range of people from police officers to magistrates and from charity workers to counsellors, all of whom have my utmost respect and admiration for the challenging work which they do. Instead, we’re directly involved in the development of a service which will provide the government and police constabularies with tangible data relating to hate crime. Areas of concern will consequently be identified, which in turn will influence local and national policies and feed into reporting for the Office for National Statistics, support decision-making and ensure that resources are deployed effectively and in a timely manner. I’m referring to the National Data Quality Improvement Service- NDQIS.

From our previous blog posts, you may be aware that NDQIS is already being used within the context of knife enabled crime in England and Wales,^[2] and working closely with crime specialists in the Home Office, we are now making excellent progress in developing equivalent processes for analysing hate crime. In a nutshell, the NDQIS system ingests police reports and uses preconfigured logic to categorise these as being hate crimes or not. It does so by using semantic analysis^[3] of “plain English” free text crime records, combined with labels which have been used to flag the offence type and any relevant aggravating factors. Often this is a fully automatic, computer assisted classification process, but for the more ambiguous records, manual review by a data steward may be required. This person will be a suitably trained member of the police force which recorded the crime, and will be able to use their experience and judgement to determine whether or not a hate crime is likely to have occurred. 

What exactly constitutes a hate crime? 

While I have so far discussed hate crimes based upon a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – or even perceived persuasions and identities – there are, of course, people within our society who are victims of hate crime for other reasons. The most obvious of these groups are offences involving people from different racial backgrounds or those who hold differing religious beliefs. Statistically, crimes against racial and/or religious groups have also been increasing. By way of example, crime statistics of physical assaults on people of the Jewish faith rose by 78% between 2020 and 2021.^[4] Here, NDQIS continues its categorisation further, to identify which hate crime category is relevant for each police report, bearing in mind that people can be victimised for multiple reasons, in which case a single report may appear within multiple categories. The following diagram illustrates this flow of data: 

As can be seen above, there are currently five monitored categories of hate crime, four of which I have already mentioned: race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender. The fifth, but certainly no less important category relates to crimes against people with a disability. Despite a 9% reduction in disability hate crimes being reported nationally between 2020 and 2021,^[4] there is clearly still work to be done, as some regions observed an increase in such crimes. For example, Cheshire reported a 22% increase over the same period.^[5] 

In recent times, there have been discussions concerning the possibility of adding additional categories. Most recently, the UK government rejected a Private Members’ Bill which would have seen misogyny recognised as a motivating factor in the context of hate crime.^[6] Following the tragic death of her daughter Sophie in August 2007, the late Sylvia Lancaster OBE – who sadly died in April – campaigned to recognise alternative subcultures within hate crime legislation.^[7] Closer to home, here in Northern Ireland, sectarianism is an additional monitored hate crime category,^[8] however NDQIS isn’t currently used by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. 

Should data for any of these categories – or indeed any other category – be required in the future, Datactics will be ready to implement changes to the NDQIS system, to support law enforcement and government legislators with their guidance and policy implementation.  

Final word… 

I began this blog by talking about Pride, so I’ll wrap up by expressing my own pride in playing a small but hopefully beneficial part in helping to steer policies in a direction which will help in tackling hate crime and benefit the victims, and prevent such crimes from happening to others. I may be a single cog within a complex machine, but if the machine can lead to positive and meaningful changes within our society, then I’m all for it. As the saying goes: hate can hurt, but never win.  

Have you been the victim of a hate crime or want to report a hate crime? Please speak to the police. You should call 101, or 999 in an emergency. Alternatively, contact True Vision, Stop Hate UK or Crimestoppers. 

And for more from Datactics, find us on Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook.

 

References:

1. LGBT Tolerance ‘going backwards’ as hate crimes up – BBC News, 4th February 2022 

1. Knife Crime – Using Technology to improve results at ONS – Roisin Floyd, Datactics, 25th June 2021 

1. Semantic Analysis of Free Text and Why It Matters – Shauna Leonard, Datactics, 8th June 2022 

1. Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2021 – Tel Aviv University, 27th January 2022 

1. Cheshire hate crime rise sees more disabled people targeted – BBC News, 26th January 2022 

1. Ministers to reject making misogyny a hate crime in England and Wales – The Guardian, 21st February, 2022 

1. SLF Timeline – Sophie Lancaster Foundation, 2020 

1. Incidents and Crimes with a Hate Motivation recorded by the Police in Northern Ireland – PSNI, 31st March 2022. 

Photograph credits:  

Clem Onojeghuo 

Fotis Fotopoulos 

James Eades 

Used under license. 

 

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