Identifying HR and Security Vulnerabilities Through Advanced Analytics | Alteryx

This article describes a use case related to employee well-being and issues related to national security posed by insider threats. For those who work in sensitive areas of government (such as the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Intelligence Community), there is always a delicate balance between security, ethics, and privacy. Each agency should have a well-defined data governance and ethical use strategy that protects both the employee and the ability of the agency to fulfill its mission objectives.

What is not readily apparent is the amount of stress that jobs dealing with national security issues can generate. In 2018, a study of 128 tactical cyber operators , including both civilian and military personnel, attempted to measure the dangerous impact of stress on employees, specifically on levels of fatigue, frustration, and cognitive workload. The study found that longer operations (those over five hours) drove 10% higher levels of fatigue and frustration. The authors of the study wrote that, “We’re not trying to take stress away from tactical cyber-operations. Stress is not bad when it’s managed. When it’s unmanaged and people don’t feel they have control, that’s where we see the negative effects.”

According to one recent article on human resource and security offices are “Concerned about stress in the workplace, because too much stress or chronic stress can lead to poor judgment. No employee ever exploded in violence, committed suicide, stole government property, became a spy, or engaged in any other destructive or self-destructive behavior because they were happy and relaxed. They were stressed out and desperate. A safe and secure office environment is one in which employees know how to recognize and manage the negative aspects of stress.”

To evaluate possible vulnerabilities impacting employees of organizations involved in national security issues, HR and security leaders of these organizations need to access and analyze a lot of information to put together a complete a picture of behaviors that can indicate stress or be significant factors in causing stress. The following is a potential use case which illustrates how these teams can use Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA ) to streamline their analytic processes to find potential threats, protect their employees, and if necessary, determine interventions that will help their employees and protect their organizations.

The prototyped solution illustrated here is not an exhaustive overview of what could accomplished in the way of analysis that HR and security teams need. Additional analysis could include:

• Social network analysis to show links between entities as well as known foreign adversaries.
• Financial and banking network analysis with models to map out financial and banking networks to identify patterns of financial vulnerability and potential foreign adversary involvement.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) based analytics to conduct sentiment analysis across organizational-sponsored communication (e.g., email, instant messaging) comparing it to social media or sentiment analysis associated with an individual. This would create benchmark models to help with employee triage and intervention.

Originally published at https://www.alteryx.com on August 13, 2020.