The challenge
GraphAware’s client is a government agency dedicated to protecting the country by combating serious and organized crime. As a statutory authority, the law enforcement agency governs itself using a complex framework that dictates how the Agency should operate and conduct its business.
The governance framework includes different types of governance instruments, ranging from publicly available legislation, commissioner’s orders, and case law to internal directives, delegations, and enterprise and employment agreements.
With nearly a thousand different instruments totaling tens of thousands of pages, any organizational or legislative change creates a significant challenge. It takes significant human effort to ensure the organization follows its legal obligations correctly and consistently, and to keep it clear who is accountable and responsible for them.
The Agency’s commitment to continuous improvement only amplifies the need to keep the documentation up to date.
The engagement with GraphAware has been first class. There’s been excellent access to experts and expertise, incredible support and response times, and a high quality product that’s on the mark.— Lacey Barnes, Agency Architect
The solution
Lacey Barnes is an Architect at the Agency. Having previously implemented a graph-powered approach for operational use cases, Lacey had already experienced the benefits of making hidden connections explicit. By creating a single connected view of truth from siloed, disconnected, and heterogeneous data, she could empower teams of analysts and investigators to work more efficiently and effectively.
Most of the documentation is in the public domain and uses hyperlinks to refer to pieces of legislation and other instruments. While sketching out the governance problem domain, Lacey quickly realized that the entities and relationships among them naturally form a graph.
Other structured data also enriched the network of interlinked documents. Organizational units, position hierarchies, and the names and roles of current and historic agency staff could be harvested from the Agency’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Lacey’s team began building a governance knowledge graph from the structured data at hand, intending to expose it to end users through GraphAware Hume’s powerful graph-powered search and exploration interface.
“If we can help the business easily explore connections between instruments, identify documents with a high degree of centrality or clusters of similar documents, it will already be a huge win,” said Lacey.
She hoped to alleviate parts of the manual process by automating change impact analysis, prioritizing the review of densely connected documents, and detecting potential duplicates.
Lacey asked the GraphAware team to use GraphAware Hume’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to automatically identify references to other governance instruments, positions, keywords, obligations, and related entities and relationships.
After two months of close collaboration between GraphAware and the Agency’s data science teams and domain experts, the machine learning models were trained and fine-tuned, ready to be integrated into Orchestra, GraphAware Hume’s data ingestion and enrichment workflow engine.
Here, Orchestra was used to:
- Ingest documents from various locations
- Perform optical character recognition (OCR) if needed
- Enrich the data using machine learning algorithms
- Perform necessary post-processing and deduplication
- Convert the data into the right knowledge graph structure
- And finally store it in Neo4j, the underlying graph database.
With a full governance knowledge graph now in place, the Agency teams created a set of preconfigured traversals through the network – called Hume Actions – which allow end users to visually interact with the graph and ask insightful questions.
For example, they can search for a piece of legislation that has recently changed and learn, with a single click, which governance instruments may be impacted by this change and why. Similarly, end users can find out which governance instruments refer to positions that no longer exist in a matter of seconds.
The results
By implementing a governance knowledge graph using GraphAware Hume and exposing it to non-technical end users and domain experts, the Agency reduced the time required to analyze the impact of a legislation change from days to minutes.
GraphAware Hume automatically identifies gaps, duplicated documentation, missing obligation implementations, and even recommends the best way to resolve outdated references to the organizational structure.
It has significantly reduced the risk of the agency falling out of compliance and freed up valuable time previously spent manually sifting through thousands of pages of documentation. The Agency’s staff is better empowered to proactively execute on the Agency’s commitment to continuous improvement and better self-governance.
“The engagement with GraphAware has been first-class. There’s been excellent access to experts and expertise, incredible support and response times, and a high-quality product that’s on the mark,” said Lacey Barnes, Architect at the agency. “Issues and challenges have been resolved in 24 hours consistently”, she added.
As a result of the governance knowledge graph project going live, other teams within the agency have realised the potential of GraphAware Hume and Neo4j for additional use cases and, ultimately, for the organisation’s mission to protect its country’s people interests.