4 minute read
Siemens
from BBC MONITOR 33
Siemens is one of Germany’s largest and best-known companies. A BBCM customer, it is present in various sectors including industrial automation, energy resources, transport and healthcare. But how does it use BBCM? Matthew Kish writes.
Siemens’ Situation and Intelligence Analysis team has a very demanding role. The company operates in over 190 countries and creates technology solutions for industry, infrastructure and healthcare. The team works to ensure that the business has the correct intelligence picture and understanding to protect a very diverse range of business operations, from high-speed rail in Egypt, to smart cities in Southeast-Asia or AI-powered industrial control systems in Brazil. Our goal is to empower our customers to accelerate their digital and sustainability transformations.
We use BBC Monitoring to provide us with a sense of the security atmospherics across a range of situations. Our attention might be focussed on a specific country where we have some critical business activities. Or we might need quickly to check on the security prospects for a country where we are asked to start a new project. The huge depth of information on the BBC Monitoring portal means that we find useful information for our security assessments.
We particularly find the clarity in BBC Monitoring’s reporting to be very helpful
Ukraine
Our first user case for BBC Monitoring’s services came at the start of Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Critically we held two main responsibilities: to help evacuate non-combatant status employees or employee family members and to evaluate the direction of the conflict, given that Siemens is responsible for numerous infrastructure projects within Ukraine.
This was and remains a very challenging time for any of our employees working in Ukraine, and for us within the corporate security department in keeping them safe. Two members of our Siemens team had used BBC Monitoring during service with the British Army’s Intelligence Corps and knew of the quality and depth of insights that it could provide.
Our ability to rely upon BBC Monitoring’s regular Ukraine updates and insights has been hugely beneficial, not just in keeping track of the situation, but also in evaluating issues beyond the headlines. As our focus will hopefully shift from crisis to reconstruction, we will continue to use BBC Monitoring to get insight into the atmospherics in Ukraine.
Middle East
More recently, we have found that BBC Monitoring’s coverage of tensions in the Middle East, following the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, has been excellent. We especially rely upon the speed at which BBC Monitoring’s team compiles updates and insight reports on key events. Given that global media outlets and commentators naturally focus on breaking news, we particularly find the clarity in BBC Monitoring’s reporting to be very helpful. This is especially so in the analysis of key speeches by regional leaders, which we use to help us evaluate whether the situation is liable to escalate and if we need to withdraw our engineers from the critical infrastructure project work that they are working on in the region.
Given the nature of our business and its role in critical national infrastructure projects, we do not have the luxury of evacuating our staff from their project work prematurely. This means that the onus is on us to use quality sources of information to give objective, timely analysis to make critical security risk decisions.
Going forward, we are keen to spend more time speaking with the BBC Monitoring team to get a deeper level of benefit from their huge level of experience, and also the nuanced insights that the service can provide.
