The defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and to create strategic surprise fro W.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the U.S. military. One DARPA office is the Information Innovation Office (I2O). I2O aims to ensure U.S technological superiority in all areas where information can provide a decisive military advantage. This includes intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and operations support. Nexus 7 is one of DARPA's intelligence systems. Nexus 7 is a massive data mining system put into use by the U.S military in Afghanistan to understand Afghan society, and to look for signs of weakness or instability. The classified program ties together "everything from spy radars to fruit prices" in order to read the Afghan social situation and help the U.S military plot its strategy. DARPA describes Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data analysis and and opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role into a more active wartime mission. Nexus 7 gathers information that can reveal exactly where a town is working and where it is broken; and where the traffic piles up and where it flows free. On the military classified network, DARPA technologists describe Nexus 7 as far-reaching and revolutionary, taking data from many agencies to produce population-centric cultural intelligence. For example, Nexus 7 searches the vast U.S spy apparatus to figure out which communities in Afghanistan are falling apart and which are stabilizing, which are loyal to government in Kabul, and which are falling under the influence of militants. A small Nexus 7 team is currently working in Afghanistan with military-intelligence officers, while a much larger group in Virginia with a "large-scale processing capacity" handles the bulk of the data crunching, according to DARPA. "Data in the hands of some of the best computer scientists working side by side with operations provides useful insights in ways that might not have otherwise been realized"

1. Based on your assessment of the US data analytic system, determine the possible aspects it may be used in a business setting to improve operations and gain strategic advantage.

2. What recommendations would you make to a manager in, for example, a retail business, with respect to adopting and using this system to improve its relationship with its customers?