The MGH Conglomerate Two Divisions. One Standard. Production | Defence | Est. 1974.
MGH Defence. Ambiguity is the enemy. Effectors, sensors, decision support and List X facilities.

HALYARD™ Collection Management

The HALYARD 24-hour collection waterfall: narrow columns for each collector, hour by hour, with several lightly shaded gaps where little or no useful material was returned.
The 24-hour waterfall. A quiet column may be thrift, failure or warning; HALYARD insists on finding out which.

Decision Superiority™ begins with queue discipline. A collection organisation does not usually lack questions; it lacks an agreed method for deciding which question should consume the next scarce hour. HALYARD™ is therefore not a filing cabinet for requirements, nor merely a diary with a military vocabulary. It is a queue manager for intelligence work, recording who asked, what legal authority was cited, which collector was tasked, what came back and whether the effort altered a decision. In practice, this is less glamorous than collection itself and rather more useful.

Where customers already operate MERIDIAN™, HALYARD sits beside it as the tasking and audit layer; where they do not, it runs as a standalone requirement register and collection scheduler. Four United Kingdom government customers presently use it, and all four found that much of their difficulty had been administrative rather than technical.

Ordered requirement lifecycle

HALYARD will only permit a requirement to move through the following sequence, each transition time-stamped in UTC and written to the immutable audit log:

  1. Statement. One requirement, one sentence, tied to the decision it is intended to inform.
  2. Authority. Warrant, authorisation or statutory power recorded by reference number.
  3. Priority. Ranked against the customer's own published criteria, not against rank or noise.
  4. Allocation. Assigned to a named collector against declared capacity and due time.
  5. Collection. Material acquired with provenance captured at source.
  6. Evaluation. Reliability and credibility scored separately; duplication noted.
  7. Feedback. Originator informed of result, insufficiency or delay.
  8. Closure or re-tasking. Requirement closed with reason, or re-issued with amended scope.

MANDATORY LEGAL AUTHORITY. HALYARD will schedule no task without a recorded legal authority. A requirement lacking a warrant, authorisation or other stated power remains in draft, is visible as an exception to the tasking authority and cannot be allocated by administrators, trainers or MGH support staff.

The 24-hour waterfall

The best-known HALYARD display is the 24-hour collection waterfall. Each collector occupies one vertical column; each hour is a row; each cell shows tasking load and the assessed yield returned in that period. It was designed because daily collection summaries have a regrettable habit of making poor days look busy. The empty or weakly productive hours therefore remain visible, so the customer can distinguish a collector who is over-tasked from one who is unproductively tasked, and both from one who was never tasked at all.

Open-source tasking discipline

HALYARD treats open-source work as collection proper, not as reading done in the margins by whoever has a browser to hand. Press archives, trade registries, academic papers, company filings and publicly posted material may all be tasked in the same queue as liaison reporting or customer feeds. Each item is retained with its URL, retrieval time, collector identity, and a fixed archive copy, because public pages are revised with a speed that memory does not survive.

Yield accounting

HALYARD measures what proportion of tasked work reaches a finished product. Across FY02/03, the figure reported by customer installations to MGH was 31.4 per cent. That is not an advertisement one would place on a motor-racing hoarding, but it is a tolerably honest description of the trade. More importantly, HALYARD shows which 68.6 per cent failed because the task was badly framed, duplicated, late, legally infirm or simply barren. Waste is easier to defend when unmeasured; HALYARD makes that defence laborious.

Representative 24-hour period

Collector Requirements tasked Items collected Evaluated as of value Mean age at evaluation
Press and broadcast2141,8474029 h 12 m
Trade registries and corporate filings6128814131 h 40 m
Academic and conference material1844962 h 05 m
Liaison reporting47965814 h 21 m
Maritime tracks (SHOREBIRD™)331,2062142 h 05 m
Client bulk upload94,41138841 h 58 m
All collectors3827,8921,21211 h 44 m

Download the HALYARD datasheet (PDF, 412 Kb)

Integration with MERIDIAN and SHOREBIRD

Requirements raised in MERIDIAN pass into HALYARD with entity references and authority details intact, so an analyst can see the resulting observation and why it was sought. Conversely, evaluated material collected under HALYARD returns to MERIDIAN with provenance attached. SHOREBIRD contributes a rather different rhythm: maritime track anomalies may be raised as tasks automatically, then closed when the track picture stabilises or retained as an exception for an analyst to examine.

Technical enquiries and requests for the printed product compendium by defence@mgh.org.uk. Please do not send classified material by electronic mail.

Page last updated 14 January 2003. Best viewed at 800 by 600