Imprimisque hominis est propria veri inquisitio atque investigatio. Translated, Cicero’s words mean,” The first duty of [hu]man is the seeking after and investigation of truth.” The purposeful duty of an analyst, or a team of analysts, is to investigate a problem in order to arrive at, or to arrive as close to, the truth. As stated by Michael Chertoff, Co-Founder of the Chertoff Group and former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the analyst struggles with the process of figuring out how to “get one’s arms around the [problem] and identify common threads” of the challenge.

Historically, government and commercial organizations have relied on the “encyclopedic knowledge” of individuals and/or a team to manually put together pieces of information and make sense of the interconnected webs of activity. With the innovation of software platforms, such as Palantir, analysts are now equip with technologies and tools that enable individuals and teams to gain analytic insights through the use of a collaborative framework.

While a young prosecutor in Manhattan, assigned by then-U.S. Attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, Chertoff experienced the now-well-known problem of dealing with “big data” in his attempt to lead an investigation against an agile network that talks, moves, and spends money at structured and accelerated rates. At this time, he and his staff were faced with the challenge of streamlining the quantity of fifty years of relational, temporal, and geospatial data being processed by stakeholders from coast-to-coast and overseas in order to build an accurate picture of the network. Today, decision makers and analysts alike are faced with the same challenge; however, with the advancements in engineering and development, decision makers and analysts can produce timely and measurable results in a matter of weeks which took Chertoff a span of years.

Palantir, as showcased at GovCon7, not only provides an powerful tool to empower decision makers across government, commercial, private, and non-profit institutions to minimize risk in the 21st Century, but also enables analysts to intuitively tackle the most pressing problems of our Nation. As a result, our collective ability to investigate the truth, or to arrive as close as possible to it, is enhanced due to the streamlined process of “big data” integration, search and discovery, safe collaboration, and knowledge management. In other words, given our era of globalization where threats emerge across the spectrum, Palantir helps individuals and teams to look at the wider set of data, bridge the information gaps, and connect the dots with more precision.