MCP is an application-level protocol that provides a simple and agreed upon messaging pattern and transport format currently used by many AI-enabled systems for managing interactions between services. The guidance aims to reduce risk while supporting safe innovation in AI-augmented systems.

Real-world adoption of MCP has accelerated. It is increasingly found in AI deployments across products used in business, finance, legal, software development, and other industries, including for sensitive tasks like querying personally identifiable information.

While MCP simplifies the integration of diverse capabilities into powerful agent workflows, the current protocol specification requires careful and cautious implementation for security. Gaps in MCP design, implementation, and operational posture have created significant and evolving security concerns including serialization risks, trust boundaries, and agent misuse, to name a few, according to the CSI.

Although traditional cybersecurity principles such as authentication, authorization, and input validation remain necessary protective measures, agentic AI systems — especially those featuring MCP — introduce novel and systemic risks like dynamic tool invocation, implicit trust relationships, and context sharing. Established cyber defense strategies unfortunately do not adequately address these new risks.
These are not isolated problems that can be patched at the interface or endpoint level. Securing MCP systems requires treating the agentic environment as a continuum. Misaligned assumptions or subtle inconsistencies at any stage can propagate and compound into exploitable conditions.

This report examines these security concerns, outlines gaps that must be addressed before MCP can be used securely and confidently. It offers practical recommendations for organizations adopting MCP in high-stakes or production environments. The guidance is designed to remain relevant as the MCP protocol, implementations, and operations continue to evolve.

Adopters are advised to proceed with caution, drawing on lessons from prior distributed and plugin-based ecosystems while applying heightened scrutiny to MCP’s novel integration and automation patterns. Continued collaborative work among implementers, security researchers, and standards organizations will be essential to establish more robust and trustworthy foundations for AI infrastructure, particularly for national security and other high assurance environments.

Read the full report.

Source: NSA

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The post NSA releases security design considerations for AI-driven automation appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

INSCOM anticipates a requirement that is being considered under NAICS Code 541519. The size standard associated with this NAICS code is $34,000,000. The Product Service Code is R423 – Support-Professional: Intelligence.

The contractor shall provide all personnel, supervision, and non-personal services necessary to provide comprehensive operational intelligence integration and data-centric support to the Data Capabilities Division and its diverse customer base as defined in the PWS.

The primary objective of this presolicitation is to proactively identify and rectify any potential errors, ambiguities, or internal inconsistencies. This critical pre-release quality assurance process is designed to rigorously assess the solicitation, associated Performance Work Statement, CDRLs, and Government Format Pricing Model for accuracy, clarity, and legal sufficiency.

Review the INSCOM Intelligence and Automation notice.

Source: SAM

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The post INSCOM publishes Intelligence and Automation Ops presolicitation appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

INSCOM is conducting market research to gather information from capable and interested vendors for informed acquisition planning for services in support of the Intelligence Community.

The IAO requirement provides Gound Intelligence Support Activity’s (GISA’s) Data Capabilities Division (DCD) Intelligence and IT support personnel. The objective of this contract is to deliver comprehensive operational intelligence integration and data-centric support to the DCD and its diverse customer base. This effort enables intelligence consumers to discover, access, and share relevant IC reporting across networks they operate.

Services encompass cross-domain solutions, secure network access, data management, systems integration, and access to intelligence reporting across U.S. and multinational platforms. Support is provided to the Army’s intelligence program of record and the designated intelligence application within the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) framework.

The Army Intelligence Data Platform (AIDP) supports all echelons, including battalion, brigade, division, corps, and ASCC levels, and directly contributes to the tactical-to-operational targeting process. Additionally, the task order facilitates data protocols for NGC2 through a range of services, including artificial intelligence integration, Mobile Training Teams (MTTs), data governance, exercise systems integration, cybersecurity, cloud engineering, help desk operations, and overall mission support.

Interested parties are requested to submit responses to questions and a capabilities statement of no more than three (3) pages in length.

Review the INSCOM Intelligence and Automation Operations RFI.

Source: SAM

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John Randles, CEO of Siren, said, “This release is absolutely huge for our users. Analysts who found knowledge graphs a challenge in the past can now have one built for them. The capability automatically maximizes the intelligence scope so is a massive improvement in terms of effectiveness, for even the most experienced investigator.”

Jeferson Zanim, chief product officer, added, “We’ve introduced some important collaboration tools in 14.2 and improved intelligence products. Siren can now produce link chart reports to be used as evidence, which is something our customers have been requesting. Now users can complete the full investigation from a single location.”

The evolution of technology, and specifically AI, is dramatically increasing the pace and complexity of criminal activities. Cyber attacks, digital IP theft and online child exploitation are just a few offenses that can occur within moments, and across international borders, causing widespread damage before traditional methods can respond. Siren addresses this ongoing challenge in 14.2, enabling users to dramatically speed up their investigations, discover untapped intelligence and share reports that can now also be used as official evidence.

By simplifying the transition from search to investigation, Siren 14.2 enables law enforcement to respond quickly. From a single search result, Siren can now automate the creation of a full graph investigation, ensuring that all relevant connections and relationships are correctly mapped. This comprehensive overview is crucial in understanding the broader context of criminal activities. Siren takes a leadership role on behalf of the investigator, and maximizes intelligence across datasets, removing the need to rely on the intuition of the user. This not only increases the scope of evidence and the precision of an investigation, but also optimizes the productivity of the team.

Siren 14.2 introduces a facilitated collaboration workflow that caters to the diverse needs of investigative teams. Users now have the option to work in separate private and shared spaces. This separation ensures that individual investigators can work on sensitive aspects of an investigation privately, while still being able to collaborate with colleagues when necessary. The new ability to share the investigation across teams removes unnecessary friction and promotes further efficiencies.

Source: Siren

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The post Siren introduces Automation appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

During Red Hat Summit 2024, we highlighted how organizations across the globe are using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help smooth cloud-native operations, establish a wide-ranging automation culture and respond more quickly to potentially disastrous challenges.

“We’re pleased to have Ansible Automation Platform serve as the linchpin for these technology efforts, providing the mission-critical element of any effective modern IT strategy.” Sathish Balakrishnan, Vice President and General Manager, Ansible, Red Hat

Red Hat continues to make Ansible Automation Platform the mission-critical automation solution for operating complex hybrid clouds, from the datacenter to multiple public clouds to the edge, along with AI applications at scale. These customers and many others are using Ansible Automation Platform to deliver new and innovative solutions to meet today’s IT challenges while preparing for technology needs yet to come, like using AI as a natural progression of IT automation. These implementations include:

City and County of Denver manages and coordinates public services for residents and visitors of one of America’s most livable cities, with the population growing 20% in just the last decade. This work became even more important—and more challenging—when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid, long-term shift to remote work. To support more than 15,000 employees working from home, the government sought to adapt its new collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams. By automating provisioning, scaling tasks, application deployments, creating playbooks and configuration management with Ansible Automation Platform, Denver supported 514% growth in Teams use. They also quickly launched a digital emergency operations center (EOC) with 75% completion over a single weekend early in the pandemic, providing a central facility for government leaders to strategically enact emergency management and policies. Now, Denver can react more quickly to potential disasters and establish future EOCs in just 15 minutes with the right people and documents ready.

After implementing an automation Center of Excellence and socializing the automation program, Denver continues to find new use cases, promote success and gather metrics to support change. The city is sharing details of its IT automation success with other cities in Colorado to set the standard in emergency management efforts.

Navy Federal Credit Union, the world’s largest credit union with more than 13 million members and $171 billion in assets, is a leader in an ever-evolving industry, where the use of technology is key to serving US veterans, retired service members, active duty members in all branches of the armed forces and their families. The institution enlisted Ansible Automation Platform for its functionality and ease of use. By fostering a culture of openness, transparency and collaboration, Navy Federal met its technological and cultural goals by closing automation adoption gaps. Provisioning time to value dropped from 11 days down to 1 day, and the credit union improved consistency across teams and adopted an automation community of practice. Ansible Automation Platform became an accelerator of cultural change: Teams who were speaking different programming languages could now share code, ideas and workflows in a common format.

As Navy Federal expands usage across all infrastructure and targets AI implementation for the future, it plans to use Ansible Automation Platform as the foundation with transparency, innovation and flexibility.

Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager, Ansible, Red Hat

“Automation is critical to help drive and sustain innovation with our customers, no matter the use case or region and whether they adopt the platform early or are automation experts tapping Ansible to support new AI possibilities. We’re pleased to have Ansible Automation Platform serve as the linchpin for these technology efforts, providing the mission-critical element of any effective modern IT strategy.”

Sean Greer, director of IT Service Delivery, City and County of Denver

“During a very challenging, fast-moving situation, automation has helped create standard, repeatable processes. We can’t predict the future, but we know we will face challenges related to hiring and resource availability. Being able to automate processes will be fundamental to supporting new, digital ways of working to solve these challenges.”

Craig Mitchell, manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Navy Federal Credit Union

“No matter how great a tool or the strategy behind it is, successful adoption of a major change isn’t going to be sustainable without the right culture in place. We initially chose Ansible Automation Platform because of its accessibility, ease of use and our belief in the open source ethos behind the project. What transpired was that Ansible Automation Platform became an accelerator of cultural change and we won big. We built a culture that is ready — and eager — to take on whatever is coming next.”

Additional Resources

• Learn how to build an automation Center of Excellence
• Explore hybrid cloud automation
• Download the full case study for how Denver supports remote work
• Learn more about Red Hat Summit
• See all of Red Hat’s news announcements from Summit in the Red Hat Summit newsroom.
• Follow @RedHatSummit or #RHSummit on Twitter/X for event-specific updates

Join us May 12-15, 2025 in Orlando, Florida for Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2025. You can sign up to receive email updates directly to your inbox or keep an eye on our website for more details to come.

About Red Hat

­Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers develop cloud-native applications, integrate existing and new IT applications, and automate and manage complex environments. A trusted adviser to the Fortune 500, Red Hat provides award-winning support, training, and consulting services that bring the benefits of open innovation to any industry. Red Hat is a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and communities, helping organizations grow, transform, and prepare for the digital future.

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The post Red Hat Extends Mission-Critical Automation for Customers Across the Hybrid Cloud appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

If your idea of automation is robots replacing humans, think again.

While some may argue that automation is about implementing a system to streamline repetitive tasks and eliminate human labor, the reality is much more nuanced — and hopeful. More than simply automating tasks that humans are already doing, automation — done intelligently — elevates and amplifies humans, helping them do more strategic work while making their lives easier.

With automation, data workers can answer bigger questions, seek out more transformative business outcomes, and ease the burden of those time-consuming, manual tasks that eat up precious minutes every day.

In this blog, we explore what automated analytics is, including how you can — and why you should — use it in your day-to-day work, whether you’re a data analyst, data scientist, or business user.

“Organizations that invest in integrated automation platforms that span analytics, data science, AI, and process automation will extend the reach of their transformation initiatives and build a sustainable competitive advantage.”

— John Santaferraro, Research Director, Analytics, BI, & Data Science, EMA

What is automated analytics?

Picture all those time-consuming tasks that monopolize your workday and keep your deadlines just out of arm’s reach — tasks like wrangling, parsing, cleansing, and formatting data. All of those manual, repetitive tasks are ripe for automation.

Automated analytics is the use of software and AI — typically machine learning (ML) algorithms or generative AI — to automate end-to-end analytics. Similar to business process automation (BPA), automated analytics connects disparate systems (e.g., your data warehouse, analytics platform, and dashboarding tool) to create a unified and end-to-end analytics workflow.

Automated analytics solutions can automate any piece of the analytics lifecycle (or all of it), including collecting data, preparing and blending data, analyzing data, building reports, constructing models, and even generating email summaries and PowerPoint decks for stakeholders.

Types of automated analytics include:

Automated machine learning (AutoML): AutoML platforms help data workers quickly deploy models through the use of low-code, no-code solutions. These solutions can automate every step of the model-building process, including defining a business problem, selecting the right features, writing the code for that model, and even fine-tuning it.

Generative AI: Many automated analytics solutions today integrate generative AI capabilities into their tools, helping data workers further automate steps of the analytics lifecycle. For example, generative AI features in Alteryx can help you with governance and documentation by generating summaries of an analytics workflow’s purpose, inputs, outputs, and key logic steps. These features can also help you quickly generate slide decks or emails to share insights with key stakeholders.

Analytics automation: Analytics automation platforms like Alteryx can automate end-to-end analytic processes, including data ingestion, prep & blend, transformation, and reporting. With a visual, intuitive interface, you can build analytic workflows once and then automate them forever. These solutions can connect and unify different solutions, like an RPA system, which can automatically modify a file or data set at the end of an analytic workflow.

Business intelligence: Business intelligence refers to the strategies and technologies used to analyze data and share those insights via data visualizations and dashboards. Automated analytics can automate the steps of business intelligence, automatically surfacing hidden insights in your data and even generating dashboards to help key stakeholders always have the information they need to make informed decisions.

Not only do the various forms of automated analytics help data workers with some of the most time-consuming tasks in their work days, but automated analytics also lowers the barrier to entry for more technical forms of data analytics and data science — such as building predictive models — helping data workers increase the scope of what’s possible.

“Analytics professionals are critical thinkers, creative problem solvers, and active listeners that help build solutions for end users. That being said, just like many other professions, there are many tasks in the analytics lifecycle that can be repetitive or mundane that still require human oversight. With the dawn of generative AI, there’s a huge opportunity to automate these tasks so that human operators can spend more time on strategic, innately human activities like picking up new projects, spending more time understanding the business, or generally providing more value to their organizations.”

— Peter Martinez, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alteryx

Why you should automate your analytics

From faster insights to reducing errors, here are several reasons you should use automated analytics.

Reduce Manual Work

Manual data preparation and cleansing in spreadsheets has been a thorn in data workers’ side for years, with one study showing the typical analyst devotes two hours per day exclusively to data preparation (or roughly 500 hours a year).

Automated analytics can do that same work in seconds, saving data workers hours, just like Bank al Etihad, which reduced its data processing time by 80%.

Find Insights Faster

Most enterprise analytic workflows use millions of rows of data. Tabular worksheets simply can’t keep up in the age of big data. Automated analytics also help you bypass the constraints of spreadsheets by pulling all your data into an analytics automation solution built for massive volumes of data. Not only can you offload processing onto a server for faster analysis, but you can also automate multiple parts of the analytics lifecycle, saving time at every turn and freeing up your day for more strategic activities — like helping business users define and overcome challenges and finding more ways to save the business money.

Avoid Errors

Working in spreadsheets involves complex calculations with huge volumes of data happening in small cells. Analytics automation solutions like Alteryx have a visual interface where you can see exactly what’s happening to your data at each step of your workflow, helping you avoid costly errors. In addition, manual work like copying & pasting and manually typing in values is more prone to error. Automation can streamline these tasks to reduce the risk of typos.

Collaboration

Most automated analytics solutions are either cloud-based or hybrid, meaning you can easily collaborate with team members on analytic processes and workflows. Not only that, but automated analytics solutions also lower the barrier to entry for machine learning and predictive modeling, creating a way for data scientists and analysts to work together that simply wasn’t possible before.

Accelerate Your Career

When you’re finding real-time insights, saving the business money, and avoiding mistakes, you’re bound to get noticed. Analytics automation solutions can help you accelerate your career by helping you accomplish more than before.

Automated Data Analysis Process

Automated analytics can look different depending on your organization’s needs, but here are a few steps we recommend to get started:

1.    Define your business problem

First, determine what you’re trying to solve with an automated analytics solution. Are you trying to automate prep & blend or quickly iterate on machine learning models? By understanding your goal, you can choose the type of automated analytics solution that’s right for your team.

2.    Select the right solution

Some automated analytics solutions cover end-to-end analytics and a myriad of use cases. Others are more like oyster knives — they have a very specific function and purpose, like optimizing a marketing campaign or forecasting revenue. Once you know which business problem you’re trying to solve, search for a solution that meets that problem AND is enterprise-grade, meaning it has robust security features and will easily integrate with your existing infrastructure, data, and applications. This will ensure you can get up and running quickly without any unexpected hiccups.

3.    Gather the appropriate data

Once you have a solution in place, it’s now a matter of putting your automated analytics to work. Make sure you’re collecting the data you want to analyze — whether that’s from your CRM, ERP, financial systems, social media accounts, web analytics, etc. — then build your analytics workflow and watch as the process runs fully automated.

4.    Execute then optimize

Automating prep & blend today doesn’t mean you can’t delve into predictive modeling tomorrow. Over time, you’ll find areas for incremental improvements. Automation is a force multiplier, helping you do more than you could without it. The more you can automate, the more room you have for strategic, value-added activities.

Examples of Automated Analytics

Here are several examples of analytics automation in action.

Demand Forecasting

Retailers always need to know how much stock they should order and when they should order it — but often, improving on-shelf availability and avoiding stockouts is left up to guesswork. Demand forecasting can eliminate the guesswork by modeling the delivery of products all the way from supplier to shelf. Analytics automation can help you build demand forecasting models in three quick steps.

1. Data Connection: Automatically pull in historical sales data and supply chain capability data.
2. Prep and Blend: Blend and format data to input into a model.
3. Build a predictive model: Create a model (with or without code) that predicts expected future sales.

What-if Analysis in Financial Forecasting

FP&A professionals often turn to the Data Table feature in spreadsheets for a major portion of their financial modeling. For example, they perform what-if analysis by making tables with the proper range of interest rates and terms, then specifying the data table inputs and generating results. While this allows them to explore a wide range of scenarios, it’s well-known to be a time-consuming and error-prone approach. With an analytics automation solution, you can replicate the Data Table function of spreadsheets for greater accuracy with far less work.

With analytics automation platforms like Alteryx, you can:

• Save time and reduce errors
• Construct data tables for multiple scenarios and easily change parameters after initial testing
• Hard-code calculations for any scenario while maintaining the flexibility to change them anytime

Month-End Close Automation

Near the close of each month, staff accountants begin the reconciliation process to make sure the month’s financial transactions have all been recorded. This might include posting missed invoices, resolving discrepancies in inventory, comparing budgets with expenditures, analyzing the results, and preparing reports.

With analytics automation platforms like Alteryx, you can:

• Reduce the labor required to load and map multiple source files together and generate multiple views into the monthly data.
• Automate your entire workflow to eliminate human error in scheduling, selecting, filtering, joining, and formatting reports into data sets that accountants can use or hand off for additional modification.
• Free up accountants’ time for higher-value tasks with routine calculations automatically performed each month.

Get Started With Alteryx Analytics Automation Today

Whether you’re automating prep & blend or rapidly building machine learning models, analytics automation is changing what’s possible for data workers everywhere. With the Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics, you can use self-service analytics to automate the entire analytics lifecycle. Access data anywhere, anytime; prepare and analyze that data in seconds; build predictive models with or without code; and generate dashboards and email summaries to quickly share insights with stakeholders — all to uncover the insights your business needs faster and easier than ever.

Ready to get started with analytics automation? Check out “How to Master Analytics and Automation for a Future-Ready Organization” to learn more.

About IC Insiders

The post Automated Analytics Defined: The Five Benefits of Automation appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

Approximately 50% of organizations have transitioned to some form of continuous audit (CA). A CA system uses technology to automate the audit process. Rather than a limited sampling of data that takes place in the past, CA happens in real-time. This allows the internal auditors to “continually” gather business data on internal controls, information systems, processes, and transactions.

The downsides of a conventional audit are:

1. They only provide a snapshot of the business at a point in the past. This means that issues may go undetected for months.
2. Audits only analyze a sample of transactions and data. This creates the possibility that issues may be missed.
3. Audits are manual and require a large amount of time and resources.
4. Audits can take weeks or months.

The benefits of a continuous audit are:

1. They are ongoing and take place in real-time.
2. CA analyze all transactions, not just a sample.
3. Because they are automated using software, they are less labor-intensive.
4. There no longer is the need to wait weeks or months for company data.

Why Alteryx?

Alteryx supports the continuous audit use case and has worked with multiple customers in creating their CA system. Alteryx can enable Data connectivity to every financial system, many of which are outdated and in silos. This allows for the testing of millions of transactions to ensure all risks are addressed. Audits can be run at any time leadership require. Alteryx allows for end-to-end automation with self-service dashboards without reliance on the Data Science team.

Alteryx can handle even the toughest audit challenge.

Alteryx has the experience of successfully helping even the largest organizations like the US Department of Defense (DoD) tackle their audit challenges . With one of the largest operating budgets in the world and operational complexity, creating a unified view of data for common reporting processes such as a financial audit is extremely difficult due to the thousands of different business and accounting systems spread throughout the department. With scalable access to data and analytics the DOD was able to harness data from 1,200 different systems, reduce a multi-month process down to weeks with scalable automation and vastly improve data quality and the reduction in errors.

To get started with a continuous audit, Gartner suggests the following steps:

1. Establish Priority Areas
2. Identify Audit Rules
3. Determine Process Frequency
4. Configure Parameters and Execute
5. Manage Results and Follow Up
6. Report Results
7. Assess Emerging Risk and Add to register

Want to Learn More?

Following these steps and using Alteryx can result in an effective continuous audit program.

For more information on Continuous Audit and other Audit use cases, download the ebook.

About Alteryx, Inc.

Revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, Alteryx offers an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers data analysts and scientists alike to break data barriers, deliver insights, and experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster. Organizations all over the world rely on Alteryx daily to deliver actionable insights. For more information, visit www.alteryx.com.

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc.

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The post Automating the Audit Process to Improve Compliance and Transparency appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

By Andy MacIsaac, Solution Marketing Director, Public Sector, Alteryx

I have worked in Public Sector Industry Marketing for over 25 years. One thing I have learned is that the industry that is collectively referred to as Public Sector is really an industry of industries. With so many different agencies with unique missions and multiple levels of government, not to mention numerous jurisdictions, there is no lack of diversity in the use cases around how people use data to empower mission outcomes, improve people’s lives, and accelerate the delivery of services.

I see this diversity of missions almost everywhere, and I understand how many different agencies of government are utilizing the agility of the Alteryx Analytics platform to turn data into breakthroughs. These breakthroughs run the full spectrum from protecting public health, improving the creation of insights that are fundamental to understanding the economy’s strength, and making sure critical systems like unemployment are scaled to meet demand.

Selected agencies also use Alteryx for real-time status on airports. OIGs use it for wading through extreme data volumes and finding anomalies. Auditing departments use it to improve investigations.

Even with all these different use cases, we’ve only uncovered the tip of the iceberg on the number of use cases where governments can deploy Alteryx and use insights to propel operations forward.

The capabilities of Alteryx that have been deployed throughout many levels of government are more readily available to agencies that require a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) compliant platform to tackle their toughest data challenges.

Alteryx Designer-FIPS is the same Alteryx Designer platform that has been engineered to meet the higher-level information security needs required by US Federal Agencies.

FIPS standards are issued by the National Institute of Processing Standards (NIST) and specify the security requirements that must be satisfied by cryptographic modules to cover a wide range of potential applications and environments. FIPS outlines a set of guidelines for evaluating the security functionality of products, including encryption and the management of information processing. To meet the changing demands for security and privacy in highly regulated industries, Alteryx has incorporated modules to provide the cryptographic services needed to support industry-standard secure communications protocols and protect data at rest.

The Alteryx Designer-FIPS product is capable to support the latest FIPS-140 Standards and will address the needs of agencies that deal with, store, share, and disseminate sensitive but unclassified information (SBU) and data. Federal agencies and other government agencies responsible for federally supported programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, Medicare, and Medicaid are required to comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), which requires compliance with FIPS. The availability of Alteryx Designer-FIPS enables government agencies to deploy a compliant analytics capability to solve their most challenging data challenges in a no-code, low-code approach that democratizes the approach to creating insights that accelerate mission outcomes.

Hundreds of leading Global 2000 organizations have already deployed Alteryx Designer in numerous industries, including retail, manufacturing, and energy. Additionally, government agencies across the globe benefit from the analytics automation capabilities provided by the Alteryx platform. With a FIPS-compatible version of Alteryx Designer, agencies with higher security requirements can implement analytics automation to empower their organizations with insight.

You can find out more about Alteryx Designer-FIPS, including information on how to request an evaluation copy, here.

About Alteryx, Inc.

Revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, Alteryx offers an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers data analysts and scientists alike to break data barriers, deliver insights, and experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster. Organizations all over the world rely on Alteryx daily to deliver actionable insights. For more information, visit www.alteryx.com.

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc.

About IC Insiders

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The post Automation, Agility, and Now FIPS Compatibility to Empower Government with Insights appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

NGA, in support of the NGA Source Directorate, NGA Data and Integration Office is seeking information relevant to modernizing workflows surrounding creation and maintenance of foundation GEOINT data products. The purpose of this RFI is to probe industry to identify interested sources and to gain information on practices and capabilities for NGA’s new Algorithm Requirements.

The objective of this RFI is to identify capabilities to build workflows that incorporate automation in support of the role of the analyst in the “six pack” areas of:

• Feature extraction and attribute population – automatic or semi-automatic extraction of foundation feature geometries and the population of attributes
• Change detection – detection of change between datasets and/or imagery for at multiple levels, including for specific features and/or attributes
• Conflation – combining at least two datasets to build an improved composite dataset
• Data validation – evaluation of the content, structure, and quality of datasets by sampling datasets and leveraging QC tools to point analysts to data quality
• Metadata and tagging – automated population of accurate metadata information
• Generalization – taking data created at a refined scale and abstracting, reducing, or simplifying for use at smaller scale or lower resolution.

Currently, automation is largely developed to fully address a task such as building extraction or automated quality control. Though performance is improving, it still requires significant tedious effort on the part of the analyst to improve accuracy to specification. In many cases, this clean-up efforts do not add efficiencies and are not always tolerated. The objective here is to consider the requirement and identify how automation can be incorporated, even in small ways, to the overall processes surrounding the six pack areas.

For workflow development, many factors must be considered to ensure a seamless user experience. Performance of any automation needs to be accurate, consistent, and reliable to add efficiencies to workflows. The versatility of algorithms, especially computer vision, can be limited; analysts cannot rely on performance or can have difficulty anticipating level of effort required to complete a task. To address this challenge, automation and analyst roles shall be clearly defined and differentiated to lower intrusiveness to the analyst. The burden on the analyst shall be minimized and user testing shall be included in the workflow development.

NGA seeks the ability to request workflow designs with automation algorithms against any areas surrounding any of the NGA foundation GEOINT domains – aeronautical, topography, human geography, political/boundary geography, bathymetry, maritime, or geomatics through individual orders with short to medium term timelines that can be immediately implemented in NGA production environments.

Review the full NGA automation RFI.

Source: SAM

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The post NGA posts automation RFI appeared first on Intelligence Community News.

By Lisa Durant, NorthStrat, and Andy MacIsaac, Alteryx

Within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), multiple agencies track and confront the challenges and threats related to the protection of the United States and our allies. To stay ahead of a multitude of threats — ranging from weapons of mass destructions (WMD), terrorism, criminal networks, and rogue nation states — means that agencies within the DoD require innovative capabilities to deploy agile, world-class analytics.

To be truly effective, the insights created from analytical solutions must be sourced from many diverse systems and resources and must be readily shared and consumed across a wide ecosystem of agencies, partners, and operational teams. The following is a summary of how the Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA) Platform is enabling a DoD agency, analysts, line of business leaders, and data science teams with the capability to research, find answers, and empower operational decisions with actionable insights.

From threat detection to decision support, employee health, physical security, and human resources, the APA Platform is enabling this agency to tackle current challenges and is better preparing them to address evolving and newly emerging ones.

Working together with our partner Northstrat, innovative analytics are being deployed across the DoD to ensure these organizations have the insights needed to manage their financial health, protect their workforce, improve readiness, increase diversity, elevate physical security, and detect and deter threats.

 Stronger Financial Health

To combat weapons of mass destruction and emerging threats, programs require financial resources to be authorized, appropriated, and executed in accordance with the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) guidance. While missions and programs are unique, Northstrat found that many of the challenges financial managers were facing are similar in nature.

Supporting a research and development directorate, Northstrat discovered that the financial planning and management of resources was being executed in spreadsheets. Not only did this hinder data transparency, it also was often inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete.

To address the challenges faced by the customer, Northstrat developed analytical workflows to prepare and blend multiple data sources and extract a single output which is visualized through a multitude of dashboards.

This workflow not only provides a single source of truth, but it is also available in real-time, visible through the dashboards. Increasing the data transparency and utilization of the data, the accuracy of the data also increased. The automation of the analysis, specifically the prepping and joining of underlying data, significantly reduced the manual efforts of financial managers comparing multiple spreadsheets and reports.

Keeping the Workforce Ready to Tackle Mission Challenges

Military service members, civilians, and contractor personnel are critical to mission success. Therefore, tracking employee data, training, education, health, and equal opportunity is critical to having a robust workforce.

In one use case, the Alteryx platform is used to ingest extracts across Manpower systems on a weekly and monthly schedule. Alteryx is used to verify the information is dated correctly and validate the parent-child hierarchy before the data is exported to a SQL data warehouse. This ensures that the data used for decision support is valid and errors are reduced.

Workforce Training and Education

Upskilling and continuing education for employees helps organizations build the talent they need to support their missions. Getting a handle on what educational offerings are being consumed and how individual employees are progressing was necessary to inform recruiting decisions and employee training offerings.

Within this organization, using data from employee directories, SQL Server tables, and multiple spreadsheets, Alteryx is then used to compile existing employee data and transfer it to an external training system. As employees progress across their course of studies, this information is ingested back into existing personnel systems through Alteryx by being outputted through several SQL Server tables, Excel files, and managed through automated emails in Outlook. The insight provided through this process enable management and human resources to better collaborate on training needs for the organization and the individual skills of each employee.

Protecting Employee Health

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted workforces across both the public and private sector.  As organizations look to return to the “new normal”, keeping employees safe has become a critical priority. As agencies within the DoD make decisions on return to office timelines, tracking the distribution of vaccines across the workforce is a critical piece of insight decision makers require to ensure they are protecting their workforce.

Using Alteryx, Northstrat developed a workflow to blend disparate data sources such as SharePoint lists, employee directories, Excel files, and SQL Server tables. Several Alteryx tools were used in the workflow to output to a single data source that is visualized in a dashboard by senior leadership.

During the pandemic, it was even more critical to maintain a secure physical work environment to protect employee health while still supporting the mission. Building access control became a priority for many supervisors. In this case, Alteryx is used to load and join building access requests and security badging data across multiple locations and access points. Alteryx joins data from SharePoint, CSV Files, and HR systems to create discrete views of entry requests by directorate, department, and building which are automatically emailed to supervisors. Supervisors can use the data to inform mission resourcing divisions and protect the health and safety of the workforce.

 Strength in Diversity and Opportunity

Ensuring that a workforce is as strong as it can be requires specific insight into how diverse it is. But insights are not enough — the federal government is required annually to comply, report, and track progress against diversity and Equal Opportunity (EO) goals. In the past, this information was tracked manually across 20 different EO spreadsheets. To process this information to meet the compliance deadlines took several months of manual work.

With the Alteryx platform, Northstrat was able to streamline the regulatory reporting process, automating the parsing, grouping, filtering, and summarization of EEO reporting requirements. In addition, the organization was able to automate the process while creating deeper insights across a multitude of factors including:

• Race, ethnicity, and sex
• Occupation categories to include mission critical occupations
• General schedule (GS) grades
• Salary levels
• New hires and separations (Retirement, Resignation, Removal)
• Disability by occupational categories, grades, and salary

Empowering Employee Engagement

Managing an employee appraisal process can be complicated and adding to the challenge is ensuring that the process is transparent, free of errors, and delivered in a timely fashion. Within a DoD agency, Alteryx is used to processes the submission and approval of the 2021 performance appraisals and awards.

With Alteryx, the agency can confirm the accuracy of the appraisal process for thousands of personnel, while allocating millions of dollars of performance award funds. With Alteryx, the agencies’ Performance Management Program (PMP) was able to track in real time by department what percentage of appraisals were complete or incomplete and where each department was in the process. With this information, the PMP was able to provide the quickest approval turnaround ever for the Agency and it guaranteed the correct recognition for all personnel in a timely fashion.

For management, Alteryx was able to provide/build/develop and feed several dashboards for its customer to share insights related to PMP, incentives, training objectives, and job classification. This enabled the customer to ensure timely feedback to personnel, and allocate pay increase and bonuses in a timely manner that was difficult to manage prior to the use of the Alteryx platform. The highlights of the metrics Alteryx were able to compile, measure, and deliver include:

• Appraisals
  • Plan Status dashboard displays counts and details of the Plan Status (Approved, Initiated, Modified, No Plan, Pending, or Reapproved) for Performance Appraisal Yearly Goals
  • Overall dashboard displays Total, Completed (Count & Percentage), In Progress Counts, and Percentage Open Appraisals
  • Summary of Metrics (Outstanding & Fully Successful Rating Counts, Average Cash Award Given & Per Capita, Total TOA Hours & Cash Value, Average TOA Hours Given and Per Capita, Average TOA Cash Value Given & Per Capita, Count & Cash Value of QSIs, and Total Award Values
• Incentive Awards
  • Percentage, Counts, and Total Dollars of Incentive Award by Category and Directorate
• Training Checkbook and Accountability (TCAT)
  • Percentages for Tuition & Travel amounts executed
  • Total dollars for Tuition & Travel amounts remaining
  • Employee training details by directorate for Training Type, Dates, and Approval Status
• Classification
  • Position Classification Status by Directorate and Type of Status for every Position ID
  • Counts of Types of Submission (New PD, Pen & Ink, Re-Description, Statement of Difference) by Status (Pending, Complete)
  • Classification Counts (Request, Completed, Pending, Average Days to Finalize)
  • Classification Submission Average Number of Days

Yes, Alteryx can do a lot of things, but what this story shows is that Alteryx and Northstrat enable organizations within the DoD to tackle mission critical operations and business functions that allow these agencies to automate the insights needed to enable data-driven decision making to operate more efficiently and impact mission outcomes, keeping this county and our allies safe.

In addition to cutting-edge software that helps keep our country safe from emerging threats, intelligence and analytical investments recoup the return on investment quickly when partnered with the right integration services.

Northstrat, Incorporated, is a dynamic small business founded in 2006 and was rated a Washington Post 2020-2021 “Top Workplace” in the National Capital Region. Northstrat specializes in software development, systems integration, systems engineering, DevSecOps, and Business Intelligence and Analytic solution development. As a services-oriented company, Northstrat prides itself on being a trusted, independent integrator of mission solutions to the Intelligence Community (IC), Department of Defense (DoD), and the Department of Justice (DoJ). Over 90% of Northstrat staff hold Top Secret or higher clearances and co-locate with geographically dispersed customers at remote sites. Northstrat takes pride in the exceptional CPARS they have received from their customers. Northstrat engineers’ unique experiences in collaborating with end-users to understand and better define their problem and provide the appropriate solutions through the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery process. This has created a track record of success with delivering solution development services across the IC, DoD, and DoJ.

Want to learn more about Alteryx?

Watch this two-minute video.

Lisa Durant can be reached directly: Lisa.Durant@northstrat.com.

About Alteryx, Inc.

Revolutionizing business through data science and analytics, Alteryx offers an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers data analysts and scientists alike to break data barriers, deliver insights, and experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster. Organizations all over the world rely on Alteryx daily to deliver actionable insights. For more information, visit www.alteryx.com.

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc.

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