Case Study: Reducing Operational Risk for the Extractive Sector

The Background

In early 2018, we began to work with one of Colombia's largest companies (Fortune 500) in the extractive sector to bridge the gap between field observations in regional offices and strategic decision-making at Headquarters.

The Challenges

The company faced various challenges:

• Lack of communication between departments and operation bases meant that no one had the necessary information and tools to get a 360-degree view of the territories they operate. 
• Delays in processing and analyzing information on critical stakeholder needs they need to engage.
• Rigid data repositories inhibit the access and easy use of data for better decision-making.
• Lack of analytical capabilities to forecast and prevent operational hazards due to socio-political variables.

In general, this organization had a strong desire to build capacity to do data-driven contextual analysis to better collaborate across areas, strengthen its presence and relationships with local community stakeholders, better predict risks and respond more intelligently to crises.

Our solution

Together with our local partner in Colombia TRUST Consultores and the client itself, we developed a Context Monitoring System (CMS) to centralize relevant information (from the organization and open sources) and create analytical capabilities to act upon developments in real-time.

As a knowledge solution, the CMS included two components: technological and analytical. From the technical point of view, our solution offers real-time monitoring of topics of strategic relevance for the organization, the key to ensuring the viability and sustainability of their local operations for the long term.

AKTEK iO allows the company to visualize thousands of stakeholders in dynamic networks, which can be filtered by territory and topics of interest, as well as to geo-reference key company assets, socioeconomic variables, and environmental concerns (protected areas, national parks, etc.) in one place to facilitate the analytical capacity building led by our local partner.

Because all the information is stored in one place under one same structure, it is easily accessible and searchable, protecting organizational memory from HR turnover and ensuring the organization can respond promptly to crises, learn from the past and prevent them from occurring again in the future.

In 2019, after several capacity building sessions on the use of our technology with business intelligence, sustainable development, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) professionals throughout the country, a robust information system had been consolidated, fed from internal and external sources, to process more than 520 layers of geo-referenced information, 2,000 relevant stakeholders and five million media mentions to monitor tactical and strategic concerns of the organization's operational environment.

As part of an internal appropriation strategy, our client implemented the acquired skills, using the CMS for the exhaustive analysis of relevant case studies, such as the October 2019 regional elections or new exploration campaigns, and provided data and high-quality analysis to the teams involved thus facilitating a better understanding of the company's position in various scenarios.

The strengthening of analytical capacities and appropriation was the key reason our client - with the help of their professionals at the regional level - expanded the scope of their analysis by applying it in cases of high interest to the organization in each territory. In this way, analysts created new networks of key stakeholders and new layers of geo-referenced data according to their latest projects on the frontline. 

Finally, methodologies for analysis and future scenarios were also applied to other critical issues or areas of the organization, such as social mobilizations in Colombia, monitoring the communications area's interests, and environmental feasibility analysis. Those who have led these processes have benefited from this repository of updated information, ongoing context monitoring, and strategic analysis methodologies.

Results

• Increased analytical capabilities to understand the local context and public perceptions around strategic and operational importance issues.
• The client acquired a better-shared understanding of the complex dynamics between community stakeholders, their interests, and the company.
• More than 70% of our users use the CMS to conduct quick contextual analysis and make data-driven decisions. 
• Our client gained the ability to adapt strategic communication and CSR programming based on high-quality contextual information.
• Progress towards a data-driven organizational culture, centralizing relevant information to support decision-making.
• Use of the information fusion system to anticipate crises, providing internal company stakeholders with hard data to support their strategic decisions and test their hypotheses.
• 93% of our users recommend using the CMS to colleagues in other business areas.

Since then our client has extended the scope of our solution to other areas of their business and increased the size of their mentions package for social media monitoring by 25%. During these years of joint work, the use of AKTEK iO has indirectly encouraged cultural change within the organization, promoting the use of intelligence management systems for anticipation, analysis, and informed decision-making.