POLICY AND
REFINEMENT TOOLS

Businesses are looking for more options and support when it comes to policy development, testing and refinement. Technically Creative is providing new ways to utilize your surveillance platform’s incoming data to better serve your business. TC offers Replay functionality, data aggregation and collection, and data enrichment, along with reporting capabilities as a tool for policy/rule testing and refinement through the TC Oversight Controls (TCOC) platform. With TCOC, businesses have options to simplify and aid in policy and rule development & refinement.

Replay Functionality

The Replay functionality from TC Oversight Controls is a testing process with the ability to run the same data repeatedly into your surveillance platform in order to support your policy refinement process. TCOC’s Replay functionality can help in the policy development and refinement process by collecting data and “replaying” it. Replaying data streamlines the refinement process by allowing users to run a mass quantity of messages into the remote platforms, mimicking any type of data. Messages can be sent out as many times as necessary when testing an environment, tagged for identification, or transformed to avoid things like deduplication processes of the archive. This comes in handy when testing out supervision policies, training analytics engines, or testing new archive platforms.

TCOC’s Replay can be a key tool for your business’s policy development and refinement process. Replay functionality works by receiving a live stream of production mail or archive files, taking a copy, and creating a cache of test data. This cache can be amended with specific test messages (usually known as true positives) in order to not limit it to current mail. For a refinement test, Replay can be instructed to deliver messages as if they were coming through their normal communication channel. Once the message is delivered to supervision, reports or extracts can be executed and reconciled against that cache to give you results on trigger rates and policy changes.

See Replay in Action

DATA AGGREGATION

Data aggregation through TCOC helps collect data from various platforms and convert it into a format understood by your archive or supervision platform. TCOC can transform any data source – whether one or multiple – into an archive or analytics environment-supported data format to ensure your business remains in compliance for supervision and archiving. TCOC can pull data from any source it can connect to in an “everything to everything” scenario. Data aggregation becomes another tool for testing policies/rules and processing refinement with various sources – from XML data files, to chat logs, to other platforms – and converting them into messages. These messages are usable in your archive and surveillance platform as test messages, against which you can run a policy/rule.

Data aggregation is used for getting certain data into an archive, but it can also be used to collect data to use with Replay functionality. When using Replay with messages converted with data aggregation, we can also incorporate data masking/obfuscation (i.e., changing enough of the data so that all PII type content is not identifiable, but still having enough information with which to write a policy) to aid in policy development and refinement

DATA ENRICHMENT

Data Enrichment, another function of the TCOC platform, can be utilized as a way to provide functions not available in your current supervision platform’s rule capabilities by getting in-line within the mail flow. When inline, TCOC can leverage various analytics, lexical, phonetic, and classification engines to analyze mail before going to supervision. The platform can then tag or add properties to the content that can be leveraged by your supervision platform. Data Enrichment integrates the mail stream with other data, such as incorporating the knowledge of someone working on a particular acquisition, tagging people, deeming certain users as high risk, or identifying sentiment in a communication for an inappropriate communications policy.


For example, one popular scenario we have applied several times is content outside the bubble. This comes into play within the legal world with the sharing of privileged information to non-approved individuals. As a specific integration, this works by linking your mail flow through TCOC to your Mergers and Acquisitions platform. We take the list of deals, the people working on them, and effectively create what is a bubble for certain content. If the content leaves the bubble, it can be tagged for the supervision platform for review. TCOC provides near real time integration with your M&A platform and your mail flow, effectively creating a supervision capability based on live information rather than having to edit and maintain lexicon-based policies.


To further illustrate data enrichment tagging capabilities with real time/live data, TCOC can be leveraged to apply wall crossing and information boundary type logic. Through our lookup engine, we can identify people in various departments (Investment Banking vs. Research), then add a property to identify different groups inside a business by using data enrichment tagging. Those tags can then be leveraged by your supervision platform for bringing messages up for review.

Reporting

As part of policy development and refinement tools, TCOC will assemble reports that note comparison changes in refined policies and evidence reports for refinement releases. This allows businesses to track the changes and effectiveness of their refinement process and keep those records for evidencing later.

  • DIFFERENCING REPORT
  • REFINEMENT RELEASE REPORT

Differencing reports denote changes in syntax when a policy is refined by listing both old and new extracted text. This report allows clients to see what changes took place during policy refinement and measure the effectiveness of the refinement.

Once the refinements have been released, a Refinement Release Report shows evidence of changes when a policy is ready for release. This includes a summary of changes, areas of change, and the details of each change.

To learn more about Communication Surveillance Policy and Rules, schedule a 15-minute discovery call today with Technically Creative Experts.