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iForce™ Heroes Program The Human Side of the Internet |
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Click below to see: The Human Side of the Internet Delivering Software as a Service A Mobile Sales Infrastructurre Turning Shipping Ports into Data Ports Conclusion: Quality and Reliability
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Few organizations can measure the benefits of its web presence as poignantly as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Whereas commercial firms benchmark their Internet achievements with the boardroom metrics of improved sales and increased brand awareness, the NCMEC denominates its successes in human lives—specifically, the number of desperate families it has helped to reunite with their children. Established in 1984 to serve as a clearinghouse
for information about missing children, the NCMEC has played a
key role in the search for lost kids since its inception. Under
the leadership of its CEO and President, Ernie Allen, the organization—a
public/private partnership funded by the U.S. Congress and several
private entities—has evolved from a bootstrap phone-based
center to a sophisticated international body that works closely
with law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and
18 other countries. But it is the NCMEC’s
adoption of Internet technologies in recent years that has most enabled
the organization to develop into a global network for collecting and
supplying potentially life-saving information to law enforcement agencies
and the public. Significantly, the Net has cut to mere minutes the time
it takes to disseminate information about missing children throughout
the world, and that has had a direct impact on the organization’s
success rate. “The benefits of
the Web have been enormous,” says the NCMEC’s Allen. “Before,
when a child was reported missing, we had to wait for the child’s
photo and then distribute it, and that could take days. Now, a police
department can scan in a photo, send it over online, and we can put
it out within minutes.” The NCMEC began employing
advanced computer technology in the early 1990s with its use of digital
editing procedures that permitted investigators to “age” the
photos of children who had disappeared years before. By the end of the
decade, the NCMEC had refined its digital technologies to the point
that it now supported more than a dozen public web sites, as well as
Java™ applets that sit on thousands of other sites, promoting the
NCMEC’s services. |
