NSA Whistleblowers Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe come out of retirement to launch Pretty Good Knowledge, a company providing decision intelligence solutions for organizations engaging in Big Data challenges. The company offers strategic advisory and project services for commercial and government organizations to help them realize an automated, real-time decision intelligence process at scale.
The company brings together Bill and Kirk’s decades of experience in generating knowledge from data and combines this with the very latest techniques and technologies in data science, system engineering and cyber security. Both Bill and Kirk received high awards whilst creating a concept to achieve real-time processing of massive data, providing privacy and fast filtering to deliver essential knowledge to the right people at the right time based on experience gained while working at the NSA and other U.S. Government organizations.
In 2015, the documentary ‘A Good American’ was released highlighting their experiences as whistleblowers after the US misused the systems they created by removing the security and privacy controls which had been built into the system. Bill and Kirk have launched Pretty Good Knowledge to bring this approach to both public and private sectors and over the last year they have completed prototype projects in various financial services and government organizations in Europe. During this time, Bill and Kirk have been developing a new architecture with data scientists and system engineers in the Netherlands to ensure the very latest techniques and technologies have been adopted.
The company’s newly defined Automated Decision Intelligence Architecture (ADIA) is the new approach which Pretty Good Knowledge uses to accelerate projects with their customers. This framework provides a real-time ‘situational awareness’ capability for organizations to quickly and effectively respond to previously unforeseen internal and external market dynamics.
Bill and Kirk now spend their time traveling between the US and Europe working directly with clients and providing lectures at their Pretty Good Academy and other educational institutions to educate the future generations of data experts on how to conduct data analysis in ways which are more powerful in producing relevant results, while respecting the law and the human right to privacy.
Reasons for choosing the Netherlands as headquarters for Pretty Good Knowledge stemmed from the country’s pioneering efforts on legislation around data protection and privacy. The Dutch anticipated the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legal framework well ahead of the rest of the world, launching their own Dutch Personal Data Protection Act in 2016. The protection of data and ensuring privacy always been a top concern among Dutch businesses. According to Bill Binney, “We know how to achieve market and security intelligence without sacrificing privacy or breaking laws, and we are excited how quickly our customers realize how much more is possible when using a disciplined and structured approach.”
Data continues to grow exponentially. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow to over $203 billion by 2020. To stay competitive, companies need to incorporate analytics into their strategic vision and make smarter investments in their data. Pretty Good Knowledge works closely to prioritize investments and find knowledge hidden in data, improving the overall confidence and control of organizations with sensitive data. With the ADIA approach and their data analysis philosophies and solutions, Pretty Good Knowledge ensures organizations gain huge insights into their data while keeping it secure and private.
“Most organizations are wasting money trying to manage more data than they can handle. Others are missing out on business value by not utilizing the data they already have,” said Kirk Wiebe, who is Director of Analytics at Pretty Good Knowledge. “At Pretty Good Knowledge we work closely with you to make the impact of data on your business measurable, meaningful and scalable.”
Pretty Good Knowledge is committed to the vision that ‘Data Made Easy’ is achievable for organizations of any type, size and complexity. They are establishing a strong ecosystem of partners to provide enterprise services and are pursuing their ambition to provide high-performance, real-time data analytics software for specific industries.
Disclosure: This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company
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