{"id":47,"date":"2009-11-30T12:45:34","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T17:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/?p=47"},"modified":"2012-03-06T03:55:57","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T08:55:57","slug":"visualizing-food-safety-seeing-the-linkages-in-a-networked-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Visualizing Food Safety: Seeing the Linkages in a Networked World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0by <\/em>ZACHARY TUMIN<\/h5>\n

\u201cLight at the mouth of the cave,\u201d a senior state food safety executive murmured.<\/p>\n

He was watching Tim Wormus, an evangelist for\u00a0Tibco\/Spotfire\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0visualization software, track a lot of tomatoes from the moment it left a California grower to its ultimate destination on someone\u2019s plate.\u00a0 As Wormus clicked through screens that showed a flowing stream of circles, lines and dots, the tomatoes made their way from the grower\/shipper, to packing shed, and on to a repack house.\u00a0 The biggest circle then fragmented and scattered across the screen\u2013 the repack house had broken the lot apart, combined it with other lots, and sent it on its way to distribution centers, retail outlets and restaurants for life as salsa, fresh tomatoes, fast food sliced product, or a dozen other tomato products.<\/p>\n

If weeks later one of these tomatoes made a diner sick, Federal and state food safety officials would be facing an arduous manual of trying to trace it back through all the handoffs in the supply chain to an apparent source, confirm by testing, and then trace it forward to all its other points of sale.<\/p>\n

As experience shows, that is a hard, hard slog – error-prone, unforgiving, labor intensive, taken in the glare of national spotlights, all the while farms closing, consumers falling ill, evidence seeping into the ground, memories fading, and officials wondering: is this an attack, or an accident?<\/p>\n

With visualization tools, the right data, and agreements in place for its use, however, investigators would have answers much faster.\u00a0 They could\u00a0illuminate<\/em>\u00a0the supply chains, visually trace back to likely sources, and trace forward to the other points of sale where the same contaminated produce had shipped.\u00a0 They could nip the outbreak of killer\u00a0Salmonella<\/em>\u00a0or cyclosporine in the bud \u2013avert illness and death, understand whether it was an accident or intentional, and possibly avoid the general shutdown of large segments of the nation\u2019s food supply.<\/p>\n

All this in hours, at most days \u2013 with the right preparation, infrastructure, and collaboration between industry and government.\u00a0 In the absence of any of that today it takes months, and costs jobs, and health. 2008\u2019s\u00a0 Salmonella Saint Paul outbreak, for example, cost the tomato industry $100 million. These losses hit America\u2019s farm laborers and small town businesses hard.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Vision for the Future<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a real outbreak, investigators start knowing only that tomatoes in mama\u2019s spaghetti in the Bronx, Harry\u2019s soup in Buffalo, and Earl\u2019s Famous Barb-B-Q in Brooklyn had made diners ill.<\/p>\n

With data ready to use and flowing into the visualization tools, investigators \u00a0would quickly identify the first common ancestor in the tomato supply chain serving all three outlets.\u00a0 One of Spotfire\u2019s pretty colored circles would actually be\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0source of the outbreak.\u00a0 Which one? Investigators couldn\u2019t miss it: \u201cClick-click-click<\/em>\u201d through the displays and the first common ancestor in the supply chain would stand out like\u2013 well, like a piece of rotten fruit.<\/p>\n

Investigators would need to confirm that through testing, of course, and that on-site process could still take weeks.\u00a0 But at least they would have gotten to a high-probability source \u00a0much faster, shaving days, weeks, or even months off the investigation.<\/p>\n

If another outbreak popped up somewhere distant investigators could quickly compare ancestors and determine whether the two outbreaks were linked \u2013 or whether the new outbreak was an entirely new event. In a terrorism investigation, seeing the unexpected fast is critical to localizing the problem or sounding a national alert.<\/p>\n

This is powerful stuff: it lets investigators act fast on highly-suspect supply chain segments.\u00a0 With the right training and planning, they could, perhaps, signal all clear on tomatoes\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0in the Mama-Harry-Earl supply chain, and let commerce resume normally elsewhere, saving millions of perfectly fine tomatoes from needless destruction.<\/p>\n

Technology is Great, But It\u2019s Nothing Without Data<\/strong><\/p>\n

A data visualization tool such as Spotfire is only as good as the data, of course. So can this tool really be useful?<\/p>\n

Visualization technology is a massive\u00a0filtering mechanism<\/a>\u00a0which time and again is provinginvaluable<\/a>. It would here, too. \u201cIt\u2019s not information overload that is killing us,\u201d as NYU\u2019s Clay Shirkey\u00a0reminds<\/a>\u00a0us. \u201cIt’s filter failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Visualization technologies can help make sense of scads of data.\u00a0 That\u2019s important. Whether it\u2019s food, climate, and geography; children, foster care, and health; narco-terrorists, financiers, and quartermasters for bomb plots; understanding these cross-boundary relationships,managing the pieces for the whole<\/em>, as MIT\u2019s Stephen Spear\u00a0warns<\/a>, is time-critical, mission-critical, and life-saving. Spear \u201cguarantees failure\u201d for any who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Today, by law every business in the supply chain must keep \u201cone up\/one down\u201d data as part of every commercial transaction, showing what they receive, and from whom; and what they shipped, and to whom, and on what date.<\/p>\n

It seemed perfect. But no one had ever stitched all the \u201cone-up\/one down\u201d data together\u00a0by lot<\/em>across an open supply chain from a farm source to point of sale.<\/p>\n

Industry hadn\u2019t. Government hadn\u2019t. Researchers hadn\u2019t.\u00a0 Till last winter, that is, when all three groups sat together to figure out how to rescue America\u2019s broken food safety systems.<\/p>\n

It was then that Harvard University convened a unique gathering of government officials, members of the tomato industry, and information technologists.\u00a0 Working together, participants created a temporary collaboration platform for government and industry to see what could be done with real data.\u00a0 Within the safe environment Harvard provided, tomato growers and shippers from California, Florida, and Mexico provided the actual raw data straight from their accounting systems. The gave the data, in Excel form, to members of Microsoft\u2019s\u00a0Advanced Technology in Governments Group<\/a>, who then linked the data to Spotfire.<\/p>\n

It was real data, in fact, that was creating the jaw-dropping visualization. Once the data was loaded\u2014which took a good deal of time and effort\u2014the network visualization was nearly instantaneous.<\/p>\n

What impressed the federal and state investigators \u2013 not to mention industry leaders — was that the visualization tool would allow them do in minutes what government investigators today spend months doing in the field.<\/p>\n

Pooling data to create information<\/strong><\/p>\n

Data in these \u201copen\u201d supply chains \u2013 unlike data, for example, in Walmart\u2019s or Darden\u2019s vertically integrated and highly disciplined chains — is literally all over the place.\u00a0 Every business keeps its own, often in unique formats, with different naming conventions for things as simpl e as addresses.\u00a0 This is highly confidential data \u2013 \u201ccompetitive industrial\u201d in nature.\u00a0 Throughout the supply chains there are thousands of independent data sources, all closely held, little standardized, and few existing all in one place.<\/p>\n

It is a huge cross-boundary challenge: Could regulators and industry participants pool their assets to turn data into actionable information?\u00a0 Generating greater public value in this way is what Harvard\u2019s Mark Moore has long\u00a0urged<\/a>\u00a0-\u2013 in this case, pooling data that currently exists as dispersed atoms but not in usable form\u2013to reap better, faster, cheaper food safety investigations.<\/p>\n

During the meeting at Harvard, it became clear that the wall between regulators and regulatees, put there for the public good, had been\u00a0strangling<\/em>\u00a0collaboration.<\/p>\n

Government investigators, for example, knew little of the tomato business, and in the Harvard sessions they turned to industry executives to help explain the meaning of the data they were seeing displayed. (The tomato business itself is so complex that industry subject matter experts more than once debated the meaning of data among\u00a0themselves<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

On the other side of the equation, industry knew little of the regulators\u2019 forensic process or its requirements, often being baffled by the seemingly capricious demands of regulators.<\/p>\n

In a world requiring collaboration industry and government had grown up apart.\u00a0 The regulators, much as Malcolm Sparrow shares in \u00a0The Character of Harms<\/a><\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u00a0were struggling to treat today\u2019s problems with out-of-date tools now far too blunt for the job. Industry was struggling to get their data to regulators \u2013 but could not fathom government\u2019s requirements or get industry\u2019s dispersed data all in one place, ready.<\/p>\n

In fact, it emerged that government and industry\u00a0have no collaboration platform\u00a0<\/em>to manage the complexities of farm-to-fork safety: they do not share information, except under duress; they do not share information systems; they have no rules, no governance, no process for coming together before, during or after crisis to manage it successfully for the nation.\u00a0 As Steve Goldsmith notes in his\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0on networking, all are critical to cross-boundary success.<\/p>\n

The results have been painfully obvious: botched investigations and perhaps preventable illness, costly market failure, and battered consumer confidence.<\/p>\n

Visualizing Food Safety \u2013 And More<\/strong><\/p>\n

The initial displays last winter were thus a remarkable moment.<\/p>\n

But it takes cross-boundary collaboration built around the formation of a collaboration\u00a0platform<\/em>\u2013 with rules, governance and infrastructure, as Harvard Business School\u2019s Tom Eisenmanndescribes<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 where none today exists.<\/p>\n

How to foster such cross-boundary collaboration? In my next post, I will share some of the key implementation challenges ahead.<\/p>\n

Zachary Tumin is the Associate Director for Programs in Technology, Networks and Governance at the Ash Institute of Harvard University\u2019s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also the contributing editor, technology, for the Better, Faster, Cheaper site.\u00a0<\/em>“<\/em>Collaborate or Perish!”\u00a0by William J. Bratton and Zachary Tumin will be published by Crown\/Broadway Business, a division of Random House, in 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technology May Be the Rails of Change, But Collaboration Makes it Happen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1649,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1649"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fireunderembers\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}