MicroStrategy: TSA Swims through Data with PIMS
July 24, 2008
Government information technology makes me perspire. When a government news item renders in my news reader, I don’t pause. I want to make an exception. MicroStrategy is a very intriguing company. The fact that the firm has ramped its services to a law enforcement agency is interesting. MicroStrategy has been working with TSA since 2004. The deal signed in 2006 has saved TSA more than $100 million. The sentence that caught my attention was:
The TSA is a metrics-based organization… We [the TSA] use metrics every day to drive our decision making and quantify security effectiveness, operational efficiency and workforce management.
An example of this metrics focus is that since 2004, the TSA uses PIMS to run one million reports per year. TSA has about 12,000 users of the system. Each user prints about two reports a week. TSA is right in line with the Office of Management & Budget’s guidelines for managers to make decisions based on hard data, not hunches.
MicroStrategy, as you may know, popped in and out of the news in the 2000-2002 period. One of the items I recalled reading is here. Some former MicroStrategy professionals founded Clarabridge, a company focused on the overlap between business intelligence and content processing. You can find information about that company here.
I want to pay closer attention to MicroStrategy. Companies that can help Federal agencies save $100 million are the taxpayers’ best friends. I am interested in the MicroStrategy – Clarabridge alignment as well. Off to the library in the morning to find what I can find.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
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2 Responses to “MicroStrategy: TSA Swims through Data with PIMS”
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Stephen,
I caught your post recently, and I took to heart your interest in Clarabridge, and what we’re doing to use text mining to “Business Intelligence” the worlds of unstructured content.
As you’ve no doubt surmised from our web site – we are partners with MicroStrategy (and Cognos, and Teradata, and many other ‘usual suspects’ in the data warehousing/BI worlds).
We’re also working with many leaders in customer experience – firms like Communispace (who broker moderated discussions through their forums for major Fortune 1000 customers) TNS (a leading market research firm), Vovici (a leading enterprise feedback management firm), and others to tap into the rich corpus of unstructured content that they collect from their customers.
Clarabridge transforms customer experience insights buried in customer interaction and customer feedback data into actionable intelligence – what motivates customers to loyalty, dissatisfaction, anger? What experiences correlate to positive or negative sentiment? What product features, or service experiences create “promoters” or “detractors?”
Using a data warehousing approach to storage and analysis, we effectively create customer experience “warehouses” that can be mined and analyzed using our tools, the tools of firms like MicroStrategy, Cognos, and others. We’ve built our technology for scale, concurrency, and diverse user access and interaction. We’ve learned and adopted a lot of the best practices that allow firms like MicroStrategy to be deployed at TSA to over 12000 users, and in fact Clarabridge applications, unique in the text mining solution space, are deployed to more users, and to support a wider array of business uses, than most other vendors in this space.
We’re also working with a great group of customers from across travel, hospitality, entertainment, medial, retail, and consumer goods verticals, letting them mine their internally captured and externally harvested customer interaction data.
I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss our business with your further. I believe you’ve spoken with Justin Langseth, Clarabridge’s other co-founder and CTO, in the past, but it’s been some time – and a lot has happened in the business in the past 18 months. Feel free to reach out to me and I’ll give you a full update on the company.
Feel free to head “to the library” – but consider this an offer for some good primary research…
Regards,
Sid Banerjee
CEO
Clarabridge, Inc.
Sid, thanks for writing. Always eager to learn about Clarabridge. As you may have figured out, my post is really about the $100 million in savings, not any of the companies. The US government is pushing a business mode, but unsubstantiated numbers, whether from TSA or Yahoo, spark comments from the addled goose in Harrods Creek.
Stephen Arnold, July 26, 2008