Chris Crosby

I have been asked A LOT lately if the Latigent Business Intelligence Suite provides cradle-to-grave call reporting for Cisco ICM/ IPCC and/or Customer Voice Portal (CVP). The short answer is yes, we do.

Without giving away any of our, or Cisco’s, proprietary techniques you can refer to their Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal, Release 4.x which I found with a little help from Google.

BlueVue provides a pretty flexible and easy to use filtering and search tool over Cisco ICM’s call detail data. For example, you can run a report for all calls that meet a certain criteria (I.E. Talk Time > 20 mins, or Abandoned in Queue after 60 mins, etc.), or you can search for a specific call by ANI (caller’s phone number) or ICM Call Variable value. You can also drill-down into what we call the “Call Life Report”, which is basically a formatted and visual picture of what transpired on each leg of the call.

Pretty cool, heh? If you have questions or want to see a demo, give me a shout.

Government Transparency is almost as big a buzzword as Web 2.0 lately. And for that matter, you would think the two would go hand-and-hand. With all of the killer technology available in our information age, one would think that it should be relatively straight forward to get a picture of what our government does in return for our tax dollars and votes.

The sad truth is that it is extremely difficult to decipher anything that goes on in Washington, from laws that are passed to how tax dollars are spent.

Jason recently pointed out an article on Why Congress needs version control. I think its a fantastic idea, and certainly serves as an example of how today’s technology can be applied to the governmental processes. However, I think we can go well beyond that.

I’ve spent the last several months scouring the net for what information is publicly available and from where. There are a number of government sites that make pieces of information available, and private sites that take those pieces of raw data and try to make something intelligent out of it.

For example:

• The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) makes available the donor records of everyone that contributes more than $200 to a politicians campaign. But who wants to download all that data and crunch it through excel? I tried, trust me its interesting stuff but tough to glean anything useful from it.
• GovTrack.US does a fantastic job of tracking every bill that hits the floor of the House and the Senate, complete with voting records of politicians. They even make it available in RSS feeds. This is cool, but as a standalone tool you can’t figure out much more than how many Post Offices Congress has named this year.
• Maplight is trying to marry these two concepts together and tie voting records with PAC contributions. That’s an admirable effort and I think with a little data modeling and consolidation we could use this as a starting point to gain some very useful knowledge.

The examples go on and on, and if you have some good ones, I’d love to see them. But the point is when you step back from all of this it starts to resemble a corporation, or “the enterprise”, with multiple data points and silo vendors trying to address individual application needs.

Enter Business Intelligence.

First we start with a data mart. We identify all the publicly available data points (there are far more available than I mentioned above), and we create a data model that does some cool things like create unique identifiers for congressmen and candidates and Bills that hit the floor, etc. It will take some leg work to get all of the ETL loads, or automated data pulls, set-up. But as the sites mentioned above have demonstrated this is not insurmountable.

The next step is the presentation layer. Once we have all the data and its modeled appropriately, the sky is the limit here. If built correctly, every U.S. citizen could have an almost real time dashboard on Congress, or run an ad hoc report on budgetary spending, or create a scorecard on their local Congressman, or… (more on these in a later post).

I think the key to this is to treat it like an open source project. So perhaps MYSQL and something like Pentaho are in order. This would keep commercial conflicts out of the equation and make people feel like they are more apart of the process.

I don’t see Washington creating a tool like this anytime soon, therefore we’ll have to take a step forward in doing it ourselves. Any takers?

politics

A couple months ago I was in my local book Bookstore looking for Al Gore’s “Assault on Reason” (forthcoming review) and happened to stumble on a book called “A Billion Bootstraps“.

Being new to the idea of Microcredit, and a philanthropist at heart, this one caught my eye. I have to say, this book is a great introduction to the world of Microcredit and is a must read for the philanthropist or anyone trying to make a charitable difference in the world.

Microcredit essentially facilitates providing the world’s poorest “entrepreneurs” with operating capital to grow and expand their businesses. The only real difference between Microcredit and what you would expect to see in Small Business Loans in America is the fact that these loans are usually in very small amounts, sometimes just a couple hundred dollars. And the businesses the recipients are growing are to support their families and pull themselves out of poverty.

After reading the book, there are several highlights about Microcredit programs that grabbed my attention and have garnered my full support, interest, and investment dollars:

1. It’s sustainable. The borrowers have to pay the money back to the bank, and that in turn is recirculated to other borrowers. This non-handout approach ensures that your contribution is helping multiple families over the course of many years.
2. The small dollar amount of the loans means that a given amount of money can impact more people.
3. We often take for granted that in America there is an infrastructure that empowers people to help themselves. In some of the world’s poorest nations, this simply isn’t the case. This program focuses on teaching these people some of the fundamental skills that we take for granted and gives them a ladder to pull themselves up on.
4. It’s not just throwing money at a problem that perpetuates itself. It’s designed to solve a problem. 
5. Being an Entrepreneur and “Business Guy”, I can appreciate the value of capital in growing a business. I find it fascinating that the same concepts applied on such a small scale to individuals around the world can have such a big impact to peoples’ livelihood.

A Billion Bootstraps has several Appendixes with information on where to get started, as well as how to perform due diligence and research on the funds or programs that you are interested in.

Here is an example from the sample book chapter found here:

“Microcredit in Action

The Mikhayloynas were struggling in Ukraine. They were living in an unheated, half-built house that they could not afford to finish, and their government pension barely covered the cost of their food. With no money for medicine or other necessities, Galina Mikhayloyna started selling milk in jars at the local outdoor market where vendors sell everything from hand-knit socks to home-baked bread. She soon was able to add grain to her
merchandise, but did not have enough money to build up her supply or to stock other products. Galina obtained a $400 microloan which she used to increase and diversify her inventory with a variety of popular household products. Sale of these additional products produced enough extra income for the Mikhayloynas to be able to finish their house. Subsequent loans helped Galina move up to the best selling place in the market. She now has many customers and is known throughout the market as a strong businesswoman and savvy entrepreneur.”

If you want to help make a difference in the world, head to the bookstore and pick this one up today.