Sphereon — together with partners Novatore and Plamo — won a contract based on a challenge that was posted by the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security.
They were awarded a contract to build a solution for the Netherlands Justis department to enable over 20,000 Special Enforcement Officers or SEOs (aside from regular police the BOAs’ are known as peace officers) to identify themselves in a privacy-preserving manner and to enable the public to easily verify the authenticity of their identity and the authorization to perform their tasks.
Challenge: Digital Identity for Special Investigating Officers
The challenge from the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security was how might the organisation use digital identification tools for special investigating officers so that they can secure their privacy and perform their duty more safely, efficiently and flexibly?
Currently, special investigating officers only have a physical ID card that they can show to verify their authority and this is a significant problem as a physical ID can be faced, used after the expiration period, and others can simply steal them and use them. On top of that, the physical ID has all the officer’s identity data, which has led to the stalking and other unwanted behaviour of the officers from criminals.
The goal of the winning team was to successfully prove the could digitize the identities of special investigating officers and make the identity verification process secure, private and easy to use. And that’s exactly what Sphereon, Novatore and Plamo architecture to win the challenge.
Sphereon, who led the effort is a Dutch startup, was one of the first companies to provide easy-to-use solutions to bridge the gap between today’s world of document-centric business processes and the new decentralized world with communities, ecosystems and value chains. They pivoted in 2016, reinventing the company with a new API-based based platform built from scratch. Using modern, advanced Blockchain and other emerging technologies along with combining years of experience IT and information management, they have created a robust enterprise platform and API document processing with the latest technologies, such as Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence — using standards and open specifications where possible to guarantee interoperability.
Sphereon has been specialists for years in Business Process Management and Document Processing — architecting, developing, designing and implementing award-winning software systems are still considered leading specialists in this field.
Co-winner and partners at Novatore, co-winners of the Ministry of Defense challenge are well connected in the Netherlands governments and as consultants. They focus on innovative concepts and technological solutions for the digitisation, content management and information logistics AND help government and enterprise businesses to process, share and make confidential, complex and large amounts of data logical, structured and future-proof in accordance with legislation and regulations.
The firm has a reputation in being particularly strong in conceptual thinking, but also in the translation to practice, resulting in realistic, affordable and workable solutions within organizations or across (chain) organizations, keeping up with the latest technologies and via the massive and highly valuable public-private network they have built up over years.
They write:
“Together we explore the goal and set the course. What remains is teamwork and innovative thinking to realize what is sometimes difficult to imagine thanks to the right specialists around us. ”
Plamo, also partners of the Ministry of Defense challenge, specialises in allowing clients to set up a public or private, permissioned distributed ledger in minutes to create Digital Identity solutions for your customer using on zero-knowledge proofs. Push notifications to an iOS or Android device without the hassle of setting up your own server, clients can send notifications to your users through a web interface or via a RESTful interface and clients can store data in the cloud by using a web interface or a RESTful API as well as access the data globally on an iOS or Android device or via a RESTful API.
Sphereon has also been nominated for Computable Awards 2020 (education category) along with Practical School Helmond, Matchcare, Senzer and Volution, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Icologiq and the Police, the Open University, Wizenoze and Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, Vogellanden and V3R Labs. Computable will announce the winner in the Educational Project category during a spectacular show on 24 November, 2020.
In July 2020. Sphereon teamed up with LTO, going blockchain agnostic by using the LTO hybrid Blockchain designed for easy integration of business applications and aimed at breaking data silos that so many organizations face. The LTO API that ensures data integrity and efficient collaboration between multiple stakeholders. And by end of summer 2020, Sphereon has integrated with Ethereum, Factom, and Hyperledger, amongst several others.
LTO Network has a reputation as being the most cost-efficient and fast data integrity blockchain solution available, currently securing around 50,000 data objects per day. With a micro-block time of 1.2 seconds, data integrity is almost instantaneous, with costs significantly lower than its data integrity competitors.
The Ministry of Justice and Security is responsible for maintaining the rule of law in the Netherlands so that people can live together in freedom, regardless of their lifestyle or views.
