How about a data and analytics story for Thanksgiving?
And we're not talking turkey sales or Black Friday blockbuster deals. Instead, we're talking about lives saved.
We came across a compelling first-person account of how data and analytics saved Lieutenant Jeff Silverman’s life while on tour in Iraq:
IED’s were a constant concern, and we tracked the patterns of their locations, timing, and consistency closely to determine insights on how to best avoid or perhaps stop their emplacement. Every day, I would plot on our information systems the geolocations of the previous day’s attacks and observations of suspicious activity.
The more I analyzed our data, the more insightful I became as I became immersed in the soap opera of events occurring in my corner of the Middle East. As my insights grew, so did the popularity of my patrol briefings for my Soldiers embarking on a dangerous mission.
Just as a corporate FP&A analyst creates board decks, we took our graphs, dashboards and charts and made them accessible to our Soldiers. We compiled it all into our giant patrol map, peppered with obstacle overlays created for each patrol route. In business terms, our analysis was packaged for our executive team yet made accessible to all of our operations members.
That information not only saved the lives of others, but it also helped save his own. Read Jeff Silverman's blog on how analytics can mean life.
