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Jane’s Joins IHS: A Lasting Legacy and a Leap Forward
JTIC: Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency REACH Exceeds Industry’s Grasp? |
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Come join us at these upcoming events: Nov 22 Nov 26-29 Nov 29 Nov 29-30 Dec 11 Dec 12
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JTIC: Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre
Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre (JTIC) is the world’s most complete and authoritative provider of open-source information on global terrorism. One of its chief strengths is also one of the primary attributes of the company. As Ian Kay, chief content officer for Jane’s, explains, “One of the core underlying strengths of Jane’s is also the reason national security agencies need Jane’s. It’s because we’re unclassified, and therefore, we can be disseminated. It’s actually easier and more efficient for them to use open-source information in some circumstances than it is to dive into classified information and try to pull together a report that you then can’t share except with people who are cleared. The open-source nature of this is absolutely crucial.” In addition, the century-old company is a renowned and trusted source, and that solidity frees clients from the redundancy of having to verify or validate the information. “There’s a level,” says Kay, “at which they can trust Jane’s and say, ‘We believe, because of our history and knowledge of Jane’s and how we’ve worked with them in the past, that this is likely to be pretty good stuff.’ ” Clients can apply Jane’s information directly to their open-source analysis component and use it to back up their classified information. The solution allows them, says Kay, “to quickly bring together briefings that are probably not too far off the classified mark but can be disseminated very quickly to senior government officials who are out in the field, for the military, or whatever is required.” JTIC grew out of a strategic move that Jane’s undertook in the 1990s to introduce their country-risk range of products. By the end of the ’90s, the products were well established. At that time, Kay says, “terrorism was becoming a more clear threat.” The company had been reporting on Al Qaeda for many years before 2001. “And when 9/11 happened,” Kay says, “we learned an enormous amount from the investigation into the intelligence shortcomings behind that event.” It became apparent during that investigation that gathering information was not the problem. “One of the big learning points that shone through for us,” Kay continues, “was that it wasn’t that there was lack of information. It was that the various agencies and analysts who were working on this didn’t know what each other had, and they weren’t joining it up, and they weren’t seeing a picture.” This realization prompted Jane’s to examine itself. “You can always see the world at large reflected in yourself if you look hard enough,” Kay notes. After 9/11, the company immediately scrutinized its own operation and saw some of the same shortcomings. “We were a portfolio-type of operation, and we weren’t as effective at joining our information or delivering joined-up information to clients as we could be. Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre was a direct response to those discoveries.” Jane’s spent a year painstakingly building JTIC. They partnered with people from some of the counterterrorism agencies that would later become clients. Kay says, “We pulled together all of the information we had on terrorism from all of our different products, from a number of different sources, and we put it into one place, and to that information we added structure and a very systematic way of collecting daily terrorism events information, and we added metadata that allowed us to then make the product more functional.” The new approach allowed customers to search the data in a variety of ways, to chart, graph, and manipulate it and to input it into their own analysis. JTIC was launched in late 2002, and since that time, Jane’s has persistently refined it. “The way we’ve continued to develop the product,” Kay says, “is to work very closely with our clients in that area. They worked with it. They reported back to us, and we sat down with them, and they explained what works and what doesn’t, what they really need to help them do their daily work.” The intelligence centre is now in its third iteration, and each version has added new aspects and improved functionality to make it work better for the counterterrorism agencies and clients who use it. |
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Inverness Way East • Englewood, CO 80112-5776 • USA |
Jane’s Information Group, recently acquired by IHS, offers a suite of online intelligence solutions called Intelligence Centres. The five subscription-service centres—Defence Equipment & Technology, Defence Forecasts, Defence Industry & Markets, Military & Security Assessments, and Terrorism and Insurgency—use news, reference, analysis, and imagery to compose complementary data pools that can be accessed by region/country or subject. 