The Discreet Science
K2 Global August Newsletter: How Well Do You Know Your Data?
In case you haven’t received it yet, below is our August newsletter, entitled “How Well Do You Know Your Data?” If you’d like to subscribe, please click here.
Dear Friend:
The story of your business is almost certainly coded in the data you produce. Information sources like social media activities, log files, communication records, documents generated by legal and regulatory proceedings, or related Web content help to form the foundation of your operations.
Hidden within these massive data sets are risk indicators that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Inevitably, the day will come when your board of directors, your legal counsel, investors, or regulatory agencies will ask you how you plan to detect and eradicate these dormant risks before they contaminate your organization.
Traditional ways to attack this problem focus on technologies like e-discovery, enterprise search, or analytics packages. That’s a start, but these approaches tend to be reactive. Truly innovative technologies, like those we work with and develop at K2, take analysis a step further to create context, filter out distractions, and prevent risks from ever forming.
Technology doesn’t do it alone, of course; the right level of human oversight and creativity is just as important.
For example, in a recent case we conducted relationship mapping exercises to augment a traditional due diligence investigation. This helped our client, an asset management firm, more accurately understand its employees’ and consultants’ connections to sources of non-public information.
In this case, we could not rely solely on the raw results provided by our analytics technology. Our analysts and subject matter experts needed to put in the legwork to understand which relationships or transactions merited further investigation, which were merely interesting, and which were of less concern to our client.
This combination of technological and human intelligence yields the rich narrative we share during the course of a client engagement. Since we are a truly objective third party, we tell the facts as we see them. Our reporting is not tainted by preconceived notions, emotional attachments or internal, previously-established loyalties to an individual or investment.
We know that you may not always like the story we have to tell you. In all likelihood, however, it will be a story you need to hear to protect your company. Some of our most appreciative and loyal clients are those who hire us to help wash away their preconceived ideas about what’s going on in their own shops – in effect, to rewrite the stories they’ve been telling themselves, or to reveal the stories they’ve never heard.
If you’d like to talk more about how our approach might help secure your business, please send us a note or call us at 212-694-7000.
Best,
Jeremy Kroll
CEO and Co-Founder
K2 Global Consulting N.A., LLC
www.k2global.net
P.S. - I am pleased to announce that Philip Sherman has joined K2 as our new Chief Financial & Administrative Officer. Phil has an abundance of experience in both financial and operating roles, having served as CFO of ACA Financial Guarantee Corporation and EVP & CFO of Reliance Insurance Company and also SVP and Group Controller at Reliance Group Holdings for many years. Phil began his career at Deloitte & Touche. We are excited to have him as part of our team.
