Data Sharing Platform To Help Save Children

Developing a Business and Technology Strategy for a Global Non-for Profit Organisation To Help Remove Children From Harm

Challenge

Our client, a global non-for profit organisation with a purpose of removing children from harm’s way, required help to develop a business plan, technology strategy and partnership plan to implement innovative data sharing technology to disrupt the Australian financial payments system used to pay for online sexual exploitation of children. The data sharing initiative involved Australian financial services companies, federal and state law enforcement agencies, industry regulators and government departments. Due to the sensitivity of potential data to be shared, the data sharing platform (DSP) needed to comply with Australian Anti-money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Finance (AML/CTF Act) regulations. Technology Connect was engaged by our client due to our deep experience in technology-led business strategy, agile platform procurement and complex program execution.

Approach

Using our Strategy Methodology, we developed a Business Plan including: Strategy, 5-year Data Product Road Map, Collaboration Partnerships, Marketing Plan, Organisational Plan (including governance), Impact Plan and a detailed 5-year Financial Plan. To help our client execute the Business Plan, we developed a 30/60/90 Day Plan using digital Kanban to promote enhanced remote and virtual collaboration.

We developed a DSP technology reference architecture spanning the end-to-end data sharing value stream from data sources to data consumption. The architecture solution considered data privatisation, encryption, transfer, loading, engineering, science, matching, linking, analytics and reporting. It included a highly secure IT infrastructure environment with access to a project collaboration space for use case ideation, hypothesis testing and design. It included legal agreements between data collaborators to govern data types and usage, user access, security and meta data. To progress the procurement of the DSP we conducted functional and non-functional fit/gap sessions with global platform and best-of-breed vendors. This was particularly important to confirm privacy enhancing technology (PET) capabilities to allow for various forms of encryption, e.g. homomorphic encryption (analysis of encrypted data to maintain a high degree of data privacy and reducing the risk of person re-identification).

We used our Agile Procurement methodology to design an accelerated procurement process from RFP to contract, including a User Journey for data sharing amongst financial services organisations. We established a partnership with an independent organisation to manage the initial data sharing use cases until the DSP implementation would be completed. This ensured that all parties could progress the initial data sharing use cases without having to wait for the more advanced DSP to be available.

Result

Our client successfully leveraged the Business Plan to secure the initial 3-years of funding from an Australian organisation with a strong focus on community to establish an Australian operating entity, including procurement, implementation and running of a DSP to drive innovative collaborative data sharing initiatives to help detect and prevent financial crimes to stop money being used to exploit children and ultimately removing children from harm.