There’s a critical difference between biometrics for identification and biometrics for health. Well, MOST biometrics for identification; what I’m about to say doesn’t apply to DNA.
When you capture biometrics from people, you don’t really care about cleanliness. If the person’s fingernails are dirty, you capture the fingerprints anyway. If the eye is infected, you capture the irises anyway.
But when you get into the healthcare arena, cleanliness is next to you-know-what.
Ethylene Oxide (EtO) gas is one of the most common ways to sterilize medical devices, a safe, tightly controlled, highly regulated process which is critical for preventing infections and ensuring patients have safe surgeries and medical treatments.
And in some cases, EtO is the ONLY way to sterilize some medical devices.
EtO is a human carcinogen. It causes cancer in humans. Scientific evidence in humans indicates that regular exposure to EtO over many years increases the risk of cancers of the white blood cells, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia. Studies also show that long-term exposure to EtO increases the risk of breast cancer in women.
Workers who use EtO as a part of their jobs and people who work, live, or go to school or daycare near facilities that use EtO may breathe in EtO at levels that can increase cancer risk.
So there are companies (I won’t name them here, but you can find them) who specialize in mitigating EtO risk to humans.
From the early 1990s to 2019, the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work was with U.S. state and local agencies, with some work with foreign agencies (such as Canada’s RCMP), private entities, and a few proposals to U.S. federal agencies.
I had no idea what was going to happen in 2020, and one of the surprises is that the majority of my identity/biometric proposal work since 2020 has been with U.S. federal agencies. Many requests for information (RFIs) as well as other responses.
The L & N, not M, but close enough for government work.
I’ve worked on client proposals (and Bredemarket’s own responses) to the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and perhaps some others along the way.
And no, there’s no uniformity
Same department, different requirements.
Coincidentally, the two most recent identity/biometric proposals I managed for Bredemarket clients went to the same government department. But that’s where the similarities ended.
The first required an e-mail submission of a PDF (10 pages maximum) to two email addresses. A relative piece of cake.
Mmm…cake. Always reward your proposal people.
The last required an online submission. No, not a simple upload of a PDF to a government website. While my client did have to upload 2 PDFs, the majority of the submission required my client to complete a bunch of online screens.
And there were two separate sets of instructions regarding how to complete these online screens…which contradicted each other. So I had to ask a clarification question…and you know how THAT can go.
Oh, and as the consulting proposal expert, I could not complete the online screens on behalf of the client. The client’s company had a single login, which was assigned to a single person (a company executive) and could NOT be used by anybody else.
So on the day of proposal submission the executive and I videoconferenced, and I watched as the executive answered the responses, in part using a document in which I had drafted responses.
And of course things were not perfect. The executive pasted one of my responses into the space provided, and only THEN did we discover that the response had an unadvertised character limit. So I rewrote it…at the same time that I resized a required image with unadvertised dimension restrictions.
But there’s some uniformity
Perhaps if I had written more federal proposals at Printrak, Motorola, MorphoTrak, IDEMIA, and Incode, I would have known these things. Perhaps not; as late as 2014 I was still printing proposals on paper and submitting 10 or more volumes of binders (yes, binders) along with CDs that had to be virus-checked.
Some Requests for Proposal (RFPs) provide helpful checklists.
But regardless of whether you submit proposals online, via CD, or in paper volumes, some things remain constant.
Follow the instructions.
Answer the questions.
Emphasize the benefits.
And don’t misspell the name of the Contracting Officer.
When I interact with the worldwide company NEC, I am usually dealing with automated biometric identification systems (ABIS).
Of course, ABIS is only a small part of what NEC does. It’s also involved in healthcare.
Consider…artificial intelligence and deep learning-powered digital pathology (“a field involving the digitization and computational analysis of pathology slides”).
“NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and Biomy, Inc. (Biomy) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a joint marketing partnership to develop and expand artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL)-based analytical platforms in the field of digital pathology. Through this partnership, the two companies aim to promote precision medicine for cancer patients and contribute to the advancement of the healthcare industry.”
So what is Biomy contributing?
“Biomy, which aims to realize personalized medicine through pathological AI technology, has developed DeepPathFinder™, a proprietary, cloud-based, AI/DL automated digital pathology analytical platform.”
And NEC?
“NEC has positioned healthcare and life sciences as a core pillar of its growth strategy. With a strong foundation in image analysis and other AI technologies, NEC has a long history of providing medical information systems such as electronic medical records to healthcare institutions.”
As I’ve said before, healthcare must deal with privacy concerns (protected health information, or PHI) similar to those NEC addresses in its other biometric product line (personally identifiable information, or PII). I personally can’t do nefarious things if I fraudulently acquire your digital pathology slide, but some bad actors could. Presumably the Biomy product is well protected.
You could be well on the way to creating your 2025 content already: blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers, proposals, analyses.
It’s not too late to start.
Or you could wait until next week, next month…
But if you want to learn how Bredemarket can work with you to create the identity/biometric content you need now, schedule a free meeting with me to move forward now.
(Ready, fire, aim wildebeest via Imagen 3/Google Gemini)
If I had to choose between acting too quickly and acting too slowly, I would choose the former. You already know I don’t like it when things never get done. But the ready, fire, aim method introduces problems of its own. Let’s look at how ready, fire, aim can adversely affect both external and internal content.
External content
If you haven’t figured it out already, I create a lot of external prospect/customer facing content. Not only for Bredemarket’s clients, but also for Bredemarket itself so I can get more clients. This blog post is an example.
Sometimes I meticulously plan a full campaign via a myriad of Asana tasks covering multiple blog and social media posts. Sometimes the entire project appears in a day or two, sometimes it takes a week, and one recent project took 3 weeks including teaser content, the main content, and follow-up content.
Yes, sometimes I meticulously plan. And other times I just do stuff.
Last Saturday I was struck with an idea for a 2 minute and 20 second landscape video about biometrics and Bredemarket. I knew it was long and many who encountered it wouldn’t watch the whole thing, but I wanted to make my statement and reserve it for bottom of funnel activities.
Only AFTER I posted the video did I realize that this was the logical second part to a 30 second video that I had previously created for biometric clients.
If I had thought this through, I could have started with the 30 second video, THEN introduced the longer video as the logical next step. Like a funnel, if you believe in funnels.
The proper first video
Well, better late than never.
The 30 second edition.
Watch this 30 second video that I made for Bredemarket’s biometric prospects and clients.
For Biometric Clients.
The proper second video
Hey, did you like that video? Would you like to learn more?
The 140 second edition.
Watch this 140 second video that I made for Bredemarket’s extra special biometric prospects and clients.
Well, that’s what I should have done in the first place so I wouldn’t have to make this clumsy fix later.
But there’s still time to fix a future internal campaign before it happens.
Internal content
Because this content is internal I can’t really talk about it, but I anticipate that Bredemarket will be invited to a future event…and I am already planning NOT to attend.
There are a number of stakeholders associated with this event, and in a TLOI kind of way they will have different reactions to my non-attendance. Some of them probably don’t give a you-know-what whether I attend or not. But perhaps there are those who do care, ranging from mild curiosity about why I’m not going, to the other extreme of demanding to know how I could bypass this important event.
So I drafted three messages in case I was asked about my non-attendance: (1) a brief two-paragraph message, (2) a longer message, and (3) a detailed message which delved into my concerns.
But what if I don’t know which message to send? What if I unloaded my deepest darkest fears via the long message, when the stakeholder merely wanted to know if I had other commitments at the time of the event?
So I rewrote the messages so that they build on one another.
Let’s say Bob asks why I’m not attending. I would simply send Bob the first, brief message. If this satisfies Bob’s curiosity, we’re done.
If Bob asks more, then I will send those portions of the second message that weren’t part of the first one—namely, the 3rd and 4th paragraphs of the second message. (The first 2 paragraphs of the second message are identical to the entire first message.
If Bob still questions, I will unload parts of the third message on him—namely the stuff absent from the second (and first) message.
There’s my funnel. And if needed I can skip directly to the third message with certain stakeholders.
And if no one asks why I’m skipping the event, I don’t send ANY communication—and know that my decision to skip the event was the right one.
Future content
So in the future, whether creating external or internal content, I need to pause and think about how it fits into the tons of content I’ve already created.
So that I can tell the best stories.
And so I will achieve ready, aim, fire rather than ready, fire, aim.
I recently interviewed for a full-time position with an identity/biometrics company.
The hiring manager and I agreed that differentiation is sorely lacking in the industry.
However, the company did NOT agree that I was the person to lead their firm’s product differentiation efforts.
But this, combined with the upcoming completion of a Bredemarket project later this week, provides an opportunity.
Their loss is your gain
Bredemarket can now help others in the identity/biometric industry, including the hiring firm’s direct competitors, with THEIR differentiation—in the same way Bredemarket has differentiated other companies.
I won’t tell everything, but I will give away ONE of my secrets.
Which isn’t a secret.
My baby’s got a not-so-secret secret
As you probably know, I like to ask questions before starting a content, proposal, or analysis project. And the first of my questions is critical for differentiation.
Why?
No…that’s the question. Why?
The life experiences of founders are very different. After all, the reason Bill Gates got into the computer business is different than the reason Steve Jobs entered the business.
What if Jobs had never studied calligraphy at Reed?
“Before I can write a case study about how your Magnificent Gizmo cures bad breath, I need to understand WHY you’re in the good breath business in the first place. Did you have an unpleasant childhood experience? Were you abandoned at the altar? WHY did you care enough to create the Magnificent Gizmo in the first place?
“Once I (and you) agree on the why, everything else will flow from that, and your own end users will benefit in the process.”
Give me that origin story and I can differentiate you and your product. Whether it’s your breath gizmo or your identity verification solution, we now have a story that your foolish inferior competitors do not have.
THEY are just mere moneymakers.
YOU are the enlightened giving individual solving a problem that has bugged you for years, making the world a better place.
Bredemarket 