Meet the team: Elizabeth Mahmood Kleban
Elizabeth Mahmood Kleban is a business program manager for ACTS. She represents the Latin American region, working with governments, suppliers, and internal sales teams to identify opportunities to deploy technology solutions in the public sector.
What were you doing before you started at ACTS?
I was working on the Tech for Social Impact Digital Maturity team, where I supported organizations to grow and scale their compute with Microsoft Azure.
What are your day-to-day responsibilities?
Developing relationships with customers, technology partners, and Microsoft internal sales teams. I help bring all of these worlds together to build and validate new transparency services that add value to our customer base.
What are some of the things you enjoy most about your role?
Working with incredibly diverse teams inside and outside of Microsoft to create a new capability or platform for transparency. The idea of sharing these solutions and risk monitoring detection with our customers speaks to me personally.
What have you been focusing on in Latin America?
Identifying potential opportunities and engaging with government agencies. Last year, I worked with government customers on building proofs of concept in partnership with suppliers and Microsoft.
What has been a highlight of your work?
Being part of a team of Microsoft Research engineers from the Human Rights Technology team and a third-party data analytics and domain expert firm. ACTS created a new proof of concept to analyze public procurement data and visually detect how suppliers work together behind the scenes. It’s a powerful and effective way to decrease sanction evasion and bid-rigging while bringing a new level of transparency to revealing relationships. I’m excited to evaluate other networks with risk-related entities like taxes and customs.
What makes Microsoft such a great resource to ACTS’s mission?
It’s diverse teams with deep knowledge touching an unreal range of disciplines. Access is also super open across the entire company, which helps us leverage the best of the very best from all these different knowledge areas.
What sets ACTS apart from similar initiatives elsewhere?
We have an entire platform of existing products that we can sink our teeth into. We also have access to one of the most amazing AI research laboratories in the world. They help us incorporate innovative, brand-new technology to provide new transparency capabilities.
What do you find most challenging?
It’s asking governments to adopt something brand new. I think that’s really a hard thing for them to do. It typically takes a long time. We’re working with our customer base to speed up the pace.
What’s the value of open data for governments?
It helps governments pinpoint certain types of transactions based on particular data points. That helps agencies find red flags and surface them.
What about for citizens?
Open data gives transparency to government activities, which builds trust with citizens. It’s also really empowering for citizens to learn about whatever topic they’re interested in, like deforestation in the Amazon, for example, and how to help. I think the more access and tools people have to use these types of data sets, the more it benefits everyone.
