Facilitating more effective collaboration for the NATO Standardization Office

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Facilitating mote effective collaboration for NATO

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PwC’s AI-based solution enables the NSO to address its community more broadly to bring together divergent national views more easily.

Facilitating collaboration

The NATO Standardization Office (NSO) supports a diverse subject matter expert workforce, about 20,000 of whom are registered users on its website, where it provides the collaboration services that enable them to work together on about 1,400 NATO standardization documents that are used by about seven million professionals in 32 nations across the entire NATO alliance to protect a population of one billion. Maintaining this documentation was very labour intensive, as much was done manually. The custodian position also isn’t a full-time role, but a volunteer assignment. To see where artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to help NSO issued a request for proposal (RFP).

Looking to innovate

Explains Rob Trabucchi, Deputy Director, NSO, “We were looking to provide that volunteer part-time workforce with tools to help them make the most of all the information available to them in today's information age. While they have much more information available to make those documents better, at the same time, they can be flooded by that information. So, we needed tools like natural language processing and text analytics to help them manage it all, make the most of it and really make their jobs much more satisfying.”

Seeking reliability

When looking for a provider, NSO had some specific attributes in mind, namely, "someone who really had experience with AI tools and delivering those to a customer like us, an intergovernmental organisation,” Rob Trabucchi recalls. And he adds, we also wanted someone with “experience working with NATO, which would really help to accelerate the product, and third, and perhaps the most important, we were looking for reliability.”

“We had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people so we could have a broad interaction.”

Rob TrabucchiDeputy Director, NSO.

Broad interaction

In answer to the RFP, PwC suggested ways in which AI could help meet NSO’s needs and how the technology could best be implemented to be beneficial. We not only had the experience in working with NATO that the NSO was looking for, but could add in business insights based on our broad experience. Enthuses Rob Trabucchi, “There are three things that I really liked about the interactions that I had with the PwC team. The first was that we had very frequent meetings, which meant that we had short intense sprints. I understand that takes a lot more effort. The second thing that I liked about it was that we had real two-way interaction and outside-the-box thinking with multiple people from the team in each meeting, so we could have a good broad interaction. And finally, the team really invested a lot of effort, making sure that everything was in place throughout the deployment of the tool. That took some time to follow up and showed real dedication and reliability.”

Leading the way to the future

The project involved a lot of technical building blocks, including building a prototype to show how a chatbot could help work on the standards in scope and indicate where standards, and related standards, could be found. According to Rob Trabucchi, “the value of this project goes well beyond the NSO to the 20,000 plus workforce. It allowed us, as their primary service provider, to demonstrate to that we’re leading them into the future and providing them with modern services that directly address their needs. It also allowed us to learn from the feedback of our users and pick some of our most dedicated people, who can also be the most demanding, and really deliver a tool that allows them to teach us how to build the next generation of tools.”

Deep thought and good advice

Rob Trabucchi notes that NSO learned a lot from the project. “First of all, reaching out to the community was extremely valuable to us and I think we learned that we want to do more of that. We’d like to spread that out to more as we go forward to more users of diverse types. We also learned that we really have to plan ahead because NATO, as an organisation, is all about bringing together a really diverse set of national views, and that makes our decision making a very deliberate process, a consultative process, which takes time. The third thing we learned is that that consultative, deliberate process has to be balanced or somehow integrated with dynamic innovation, and that takes some real deep thought and good advice.”

Contact us

Xavier Verhaeghe

Xavier Verhaeghe

Partner Technology Consulting & Innovation, PwC Belgium

Tel: +32 495 59 08 40

Steven De Bruyn

Steven De Bruyn

Partner, PwC Belgium

Michiel De Keyzer

Michiel De Keyzer

Director, PwC Belgium

Tel: +32 494 88 95 74

Wouter Travers

Wouter Travers

Senior manager, PwC Belgium

Tel: +32 479 10 56 05

Connect with PwC Belgium