When it comes to corporate fraud investigations, the amount of evidence in both paper and digital form is overwhelming. But this "paper trail" is critical for investigators to make their cases against perpetrators. While “e-discover” software solutions that provide tools for scanning, searching, tagging, and codifying data exist, they lack the transparency and insight to show the real-time progress being made.
Imagine a news conference announcement about an act of corporate fraud outside of a courthouse. The prosecutors announce the suspects, the defense attorneys issue denials, and the accused get ushered into a black SUV through a crowd of flashing cameras and journalists. The clock starts ticking.
Meanwhile, investors in the corporation are concerned the stock price could plummet, the public is outraged, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. What happens over the next 24 hours will impact people's lives and could cost millions of dollars. Each second counts for everyone involved, but especially the investigators. That's where we came in: to help Ernst & Young (EY) build a tool to coordinate the investigation and mitigate the associated risks.
We met with the team at EY for a three-day workshop to understand their current workflow, sketch out rough wires, and gain buy-in on designing a prototype.
While on-site, we looked at where the hardware is typically stored and how it’s connected for scanning. We learned how the physical drives get labeled, barcoded, and saved into the system. For us to develop a better workflow process, understanding the relationship between the physical assets and their digital images was critical since both could be used as evidence.
We spent most of our time whiteboarding with the EY team. This helped me gain a better understanding of the obstacles we were solving for and provided me with sufficient information to sketch rough wireframes. After lunch, I plugged my wireframes into InVision to demonstrate a sample workflow. We refined the wireframes with client input and received approval to proceed with designing a high fidelity prototype.
