Wikipedia Commons
As a team, we are starting to meld together but we need to convey that to our audiences. One of the elements of feedback we received had to do with how well we were communicating our problem and our identity as a team. Although we would not like to go into detail about each of our interviews, we now understand that we should give a wider summary of our interviewing experience. We also seek to improve upon conveying our future plans regarding interviews within the presentation.
After struggling with finding contacts last week, we brought a battle strategy to the new week: Persistence. By developing a long list of possible contacts and a cushion of backup contacts, we had a plethora of people to interview. As each contact gave us another, we found ourselves in our own version of information overload. So we divided ourselves up into small agile partner units and got to work. After a while picked up on a few best practices of our own: know your interview, operating a conference call technology, and having pre and post meeting with your interviewing partner to discuss the interview.
The Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) was key to our pre and post partner meetings. We felt it was good to spend 10-15 minutes maximum to fill out the VPC to make sure we knew who we were interviewing and for what reason. The VPC helped us shape our interviews.
We are getting a better understanding of our problem and who our solution might affect.
“A-ha!” Team Discoveries.
Dalton Wagner
My “A-Ha” moment came during an interview with Contact #10. This reaffirmed our belief that people are going to invest in what we are trying to solve and that they are willing to help put us in the right direction without touching classified information. One of the main themes they tried to get across was that getting data isn’t the problem. It’s what you do with that data and how you organize the information, which makes it useful. I had been under the assumption that we needed to figure out a way to gather our input variables and then filter those in a way so that decisions could be made efficiently and accurately. I personally hadn’t thought about our problem statement from the point of view that they were almost overwhelmed with data and a possible solution would be to better organize the information.
Teresa Cummings
My “A-ha” moment was pinpointed during my conversation with Contact #18. During our conversation we spoke about some questions on prioritizing information. Information overload too easily occurs. By creating a filtering method, we can help decision makers understand what might be an immediate need or danger. Thinking about how different different missions and military operations are, how can we create a filter that can adapt to the mission needs? It’s all in the layers. After my conversation with Contact #9, I realized that our user might differ from mission to mission. This means that whatever iconic language we create has to translate well from person to person. My big “A-ha!” of this week was simply thinking of all contributors to information misunderstanding because of overload.
Elizabeth Cross
I spoke with Contact #11 and found out in a hospital setting, some the errors in communication stem from not knowing what specific terms mean. Info coming in about patients could be slightly off, a gunshot arm could actually be chest. Also patient care information isn’t charted electronically. Next I spoke with Contact #14 and they informed us about the need to figure out what social media site is used in that area. They also said there is a need for native speakers to be the ones combing the through the information and it’s important to know whether the information is in real time or stored data from a month ago.
Nahom Fissaha
My aha moment this week came from interviewing Contact #7 who explained the power of data analytics. Prior to this week, I did not have an understanding of big data capabilities on the battlefield commander level. This limited my scope of digital data to the ones stated in the problem statement. Now I realize the capabilities of big data analytics I will focus more on specific information blind spots that create problems for battlefield commanders. The applications of big data analytics is vast but focusing on solving a handful of specific problems will allow us to generate a higher quality solution.
Mark Castro
My aha moment came from Contact # 10. This interviewee prompted us to think about the problem from a different perspective. He suggested that the government, whether they admit it or not, have all the information they could want and the issue is figuring out how to make sense of it all. He really painted a picture for us from the government’s perspective and told us to think about how we would attack the “supply line.” The supply line is the line of communication that the enemy has when operating. From this we could conclude that our solution should have some way of identifying this supply line, interpreting data from the supply line, and displaying the supply line in some way.
Anthony Jewett
I took several points of interest from this week of interviews. The first is the scope, effectiveness, and power of US intelligence. The large amount of data that can be collected is mind-boggling. This large amount of data is both a blessing and a curse, as clients revealed they have the problem of information overload. While the military is exploring big data, their current method of assimilating and processing data is segmented by branch/service/organization and mainly only crosses those organizational barriers in person. In addition, I found it interesting that common social media apps and commercial encryption pose a substantial threat to intelligence, more so that the easy accessibility of hacking tools.
JMU X-Labs
4-VA
