PowerBI and Clue – Take your analysis to a new level

We are huge fans of PowerBI here at S-branch. If we ever need to get a ‘lie of the land’ with a new set of data, then it’s our go-to tool. Likewise, we’ve utilised data held within analysis databases using PowerBI before, an example can be found here.

One tool that we were keen to try PowerBI on was Clue. Clue is an investigation case management and intelligence platform that enables organisations to build intelligence and quickly manage and progress investigations. We instantly liked Clue. It’s refreshing to see technology that is designed specifically for Investigations. Too often we see people managing investigations using tools not fit for the job. This leads to workarounds and compromises – Not with Clue!

Being a modern application, Clue has its own API (Application Programming Interface). It is with this API that we interrogated the data within Clue using PowerBI.

Clue’s API

Clue’s API documentation can be found on their support site. We found it to be concise and helpful. We were quickly making API calls using the Postman API Platform to test our requests. There are security measures in place that need to be set up before you start using the API, again this was all documented on the support site.

Making Clue data available using Power BI

Clue has a great article about Power BI on their support site, with examples using Power Query. Utilising Power Query meant we could perform additional basic transformations (such as splitting out date/time fields) on the data too.

The Dashboards

On our test Clue site, we only have a limited amount of data. For this reason, we chose to focus on the Intelligence register.

In the dashboard above, we bring together temporal (time), network and statistical analysis in one place. We can drill down into the data using any one of these analysis types, using interactive visualisations.

• The bottom left shows statistics on the intelligence grading (3x5x2) in accordance with the National Intelligence Model
• The date of the Intelligence can be interrogated either using a slider or by clicking on a specific time period (in this case a month)
• The network visualisation can be used to spot commonalities between the intelligence records. The green dots show people that have more than one intelligence record linked to them. This method of visualisation proved quite performant, we tested it against some of our other datasets with 10’s of thousands of records and the results were impressive
• A filter on the network visualisation allows us the ability to focus on the elements that are important to us
• The righthand side analyses the linked Outcomes, Decisions, Tasks and Events linked to the intelligence.

It’s important to mention at this point that Clue does have its own dashboard and network analysis capability. PowerBI builds on this ability by having all this information in one place with an interactive dashboard.

Clue is used to tackle threats including counter economic crime, cybercrime, organised crime, corruption, counter-terrorism, environmental crime, human trafficking, counter extremism, drug crime, sexual and violent crime, and hate crime.

If any of the above could benefit you or you’re looking into data analysis tools in general; please feel free to contact us. For more information on Clue, please visit their website