Projects:
Free text analytics project for Cisco
This project began as an effort to replace an existing clipping service with an in-house system that would be more flexible and cost-effective. It was extended to provide syndicated search on Cisco and competitor products, and grew eventually into a system that provides full-scale tracking of PR metrics such as number of mentions, tone of the coverage, analysis by technology area, analyst coverage, etc.
It was clear from interviews with Cisco management that a primary need was flexibility. As Cisco moved into new markets and launched new products, PR and marketing managers needed to be able to change what was being tracked on a weekly basis. As breaking issues arose in the press, they needed to be able to track them and disseminate information throughout the organization.
Cost was also an issue. Going to outside vendors became expensive when the questions being asked were changing so quickly. Simple processes like providing clippings were taking dollars away from higher-value projects such as tracking coverage of product launches.
Using a combination of custom software, commercial data providers, and off-the-shelf text analytic software, Cisco can now track and analyze press coverage from 12,000 web sites, and can add new websites in 24 hours time.
Having an in-house source of marketing and PR metrics gave Cisco the flexibility to track breaking issues as they arose, to go back and track issues after interest in it arose, to add new competitors on the fly, and to explore product launch coverage to track message penetration.
The savings from the clipping service replacement alone was close to $100,000 per year. Syndication of search results across Cisco's internal websites provided new insight for PR and marketing managers into breaking news.
Digital Asset Management for Cisco
Cisco's Marketing Department was struggling to enable the field sales force with presentations that were uniform in look and feel, in tune with marketing messages, customizable and easy to get to. The corporate document system was not focused on the problems of presentations, and in particular did not allow users to preview content, nor to choose chunks of content to self-assemble.
The business challenge was to build a cost-effective system to ensure that presentations delivered to the field sales force:
- adhered to a set of standards designed to make them more valuable
- contained only current information
- did not duplicate what was currently available
The technical challenge was to deliver a system that:
- Did not require any software on the end-userŐs machine
- Allowed for content preview and self-assembly
- Was quick and intuitive, even over slow connections
The business challenges were met by meeting with various content providers inside of Cisco and persuading them of the business value of participating. A set of standards for the presentations was adopted, as well as a commitment from the content providers to refresh all presentations every 120 days. All product launches now include the production of presentations to these standards.
The cost of managing this process was met by spreading it out over multiple business groups and amounts, for each unit, to less than they currently spend on graphics professionals for the presentations.
The technical challenges were met by first processing the presentation into slides, and then using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) technology to essentially run a small application in the userŐs browser. Changing metadata selections results in near-instantaneous changing of the list of available presentations matching the new criteria. Each individual slide can be previewed by the user. Individual chunks of content can be assembled into a new, custom presentation, or left as independent units. As all of the presentations use the same look and feel, slides can easily be copied from one to another.
The new system is delivering nearly four times the volume of presentations delivered by the general content management system, and was chosen for an internal Marketing Excellence award by Cisco.
Event Management System for hedge fund
The fund, now one of the worldŐs largest hedge funds, had badly outgrown their existing network management system, which focused primarily on paging systems administrators based on individual events, such as disk usage alerts or high CPU usage. Citadel wished to build a network operations center (NOC) with full-time staff, and to move towards proactively managing business processes instead of reactively responding to individual alerts.
The immediate business driver for upgrading the system was CitadelŐs impending move into becoming a primary market maker in options trading. This greatly increased CitadelŐs regulatory responsibilities and, for performance reasons, required Citadel to co-locate production systems in New York, while primary systems administration staff remained in Chicago.
Citadel had made a major investment in HP OpenView software but was unhappy with the amount and relevance of the alerts and pages. Systems administrators had turned off their pagers due to event overload. System performance and network load data collection was spotty and not trusted by the systems and network staff who had no way of assessing whether a performance-related event was unusual for a particular system.
Several areas of process and organizational improvement were focused on:
- Creation of a systems engineering group who were focused on delivering long-term solutions to root-cause issues
- Creation of a NOC team who responded solely to alerts and user calls
- Standardization of alerts and elimination of spurious ones such as link down traps from access-layer switches
- Configuration of OpenView agents to log the same performance data and give access to the data to all IT personnel.
In parallel, the disaster recovery team worked with the network management group to develop a model of to understand the impact of system and network problems on business processes. This information led to substantial re-prioritization of alerts as well as the embedding of application-specific information in alerts to help the NOC team take the first steps to resolving application problems.
The new network management system was handed off to internal staff approximately one year after the start of the project.
Management System for Garden Club of America
The Garden Club's executive director had left, and the board had little knowledge of the day to activities of the staff, how to find a replacement director, or how to align their information systems with business goals.
The business challenges were:
- Aid in finding a new director
- Profile and benchmark the activities of the staff members
- Find cost-effective IT solutions to aid in managing the organization
