Datadoodle

You are here: Home / Archives for innovation

innovation

Homeless? There’s an app for that

by

If any app gets just 15 minutes of fame out of the box, isn’t marketing critical? It seems obvious to me that those who offer an app would rank marketing up there with programming — especially when the app’s produced by a low-budget, volunteer-run civic-tech group.

But among some civic tech groups, it’s programming first and last. That’s what one recently retired CTO and former engineering instructor at San Francisco State University has found.

Edy Ortiz Aragon has been shopping for an interesting volunteer role, and he’ll be a prize for any group that snags him. (I have obscured identities to protect the well intentioned.)

Who’s your customer?

At one project, he asked a group leader, “Who’s your customer?” Her answer: the city. Wrong. The real answer is the homeless.

“The first thing you do is follow the transaction,” he said. It’s essentially the same challenge as in banking. You ask what the transaction is for the homeless? That tells you know who you’re going to talk to.

To ensure your app’s adopted, you next go to work on getting buy-in from everyone at the table, from the homeless to the civil servants they encounter. “Everyone has to buy into it a little bit, and slowly they’re going to find it useful if it has enough bells and whistles. That’s when tech becomes important when people using it.”

The homeless app he’s looked at could become the SalesForce of homelessness, he said. Instead of hiring, payroll, and marketing, this app’s chain could be food, clothing, and shelter. The model can be reused in every city, very state, every country.

Attention to the customer, even among non-profit, do-good groups, sounds to me like a worthy vision. Inattention to the customer and overcharged attention to engineering is an error made over and over in the technology industry. When the mistake is committed in business, it thwarts growth. The consequences have far more meaning and consequences when the mistake occurs in civic tech, especially when serving a group like the homeless.

Bad stories stop good data at the water cooler

by

We agree by now that data’s a good compass. One neglected question is tougher: Which map?

Everyone’s known the kind of “grouchy guy” TDWI instructor Kellee M. Franklin, Ph.D tells about. This guy knew better than most of his co-workers about how their Washington, D.C. defense agency worked. And he was frustrated.

Over the years, he had offered a series of genuinely beneficial ideas over years — and saw each one ignored. He had become known as a complainer. No matter what he said, no one listened to a single word anymore.

Ignoring relevant data

“We have blinders on,” she said. Franklin is a longtime innovation consultant, and she’s seen case after case like this. “We can only see what we’ve been educated on and exposed to.”

In fact, she found out when she talked to him, they should have listened. “He was way ahead of the curve in thinking about things within the agency,” she said. Over and over, he came up with options that were then rejected. He saw a way to streamline security clearances, for example. As it was, his agency insisted that even people with existing clearance at other agencies got full clearance over again. But he had seen how other agencies used automation to clear new staff more quickly. He also wanted to create a working group for security issues that would address time wasted.

Those ideas crashed into others, including common ones: “We don’t do things that way around here” and “This will never fly!” Why? No reason, it just won’t work.

Other stories or mental models might have included “We’re rigorous, they’re not.” Or, about Grouchy Guy’s idea to have a working group, “What, another committee?”

Quantitative data on Grouchy Guy from his several dozen years at the agency pegged him as a “low performer.” A loser. But Franklin found much more data to consider.

She ended up presenting some of his ideas — in the way the man’s coworkers finally heard. Several of those who had once dismissed his ideas once now felt remorse.

Better stories force new data into the frame

“Many good ideas are stopped at the water cooler,” she said, when a ruling clique cuts off ideas that don’t fit their model. Those models determine the stories we tell ourselves and each other and have a strong influence on who’s hired and how things get done.

“Stories are powerful in this regard,” she said. New, alternative stories force other data into the frame.

“I’m all for data,” she said. “It moves the needle. But we’ve got carpetbaggers who promote data without a clear understanding of human behavior and storytelling.”

Look past the tech. Look closer at stories behind the data.

People who analyze data, collaborate!

by

In business, we’ve got data scientists, we’ve got accidental analysts, and we’ve got a million variations in between. Dave Wells thinks they can learn from each other. To help that start up, he’s forming an organization he’s calling Business Analytics Collaborative.

The diversity and fragmentation that challenge those trying to reach this market are the reasons that community building is difficult. Our conclusion is that we need to build the community from the ground up – taking a sort of grass roots approach that begins with local meetups. By stepping away from digital overload and starting locally and face-to-face we can move away from fragmentation while at the same time finding value in the diversity of the analytics space. Once we achieve a workable level of local communities, we can then start to bind the local groups together as a virtual analytics community where collaboration becomes a powerful tool for innovation.

You may recall Dave as the education director at TDWI. He still teaches at TDWI conferences. Now at his new organization, he’s modestly named himself director of community development.

He’s holding a series of meetups. The first occurred on August 8 at Tableau headquarters in Seattle, where 82 people showed up. The next was Wednesday night at TDWI conference in San Diego.

To keep up, go to bacollaborative.com. And show up at a meetup when there’s one near you.