Javelin Board - Hongzred/HashTag_HotLine GitHub Wiki

Who is your customer? Be as specific as possible.

  1. Call center workers tasked with responding to hotlines where callers report gas leaks, or other issues related to maintenance of large systems and are overwhelmed with the volume of calls during emergencies.

  2. Upper management in Public and Private sector distributed systems maintainers (eg. roads, pipelines, electrical grids.) who are responsible for planning repairs or responding to emergencies, and need to be aware of where and when repairs are needed.

  3. Data Analysts who work for Public and Private sector distributed systems maintainers (eg. ConEdison).

  4. Citizens reporting gas leaks or other emergencies who want their concerns addressed quickly and seamlessly. Twitter offers an instantaneous and interactive means of communication that can be leveraged for the purposes of this application.

What is the problem? (From the customer’s perspective)

  1. As a call center worker I’m tasked with responding when hotlines are overwhelmed with the volume of calls during emergencies. Sometimes, the call volume means I have to put people on hold, so can’t do my job. We also have to ascertaining a caller’s location, which takes time, especially if callers don’t speak clearly (or their english might be less than perfect.) Manually recording data after the calls (eg. locations of frequent gas leaks, in this case) is time-consuming, too. Sometimes I might make mistakes in reporting, but I’m so busy, I just have to move on to the next thing. For me, reducing workload, not complicating it, is the most important thing.
  2. As an administrator in upper management, I’m responsible for planning repairs or responding to emergencies, I need to be aware of where small repairs are needed, or risk costly maintenance down the line. They may also be required by law to respond to certain problems before others (for example, in New York City, problems with residential gas lines MUST be fixed before industrial customers’ gas lines, so people don’t freeze in their homes in the winter.) For me, accuracy and quickness of information is what counts.
  3. As a citizen reporting a gas leak, I want to report gas leaks issue but I often don’t know where I can report them to. There should also be no wait time or latency when I’m reporting something as serious as a gas leak; I don’t want to be put on hold, or have to navigate a menu before they can get the information to the right party.
  4. As a data analyst, I want to see a public issue distribution report but I don’t know where I can find it. Sensor networks help, but they’re expensive and they can’t be everywhere, so often my data is incomplete. Getting data from citizens is essential, but it’s messy. What I desire most of all is something that can streamline the process of data acquisition.

List the assumption that must hold true for your hypothesis to be true. (rank by risk)

  1. Citizens will prefer to post public issue or their concern on twitter instead of dialing hotline if they know the existence of such app. This assumption may be wrong, since twitter’s user base tends to skew young. Voting turnout in the younger demographic tends to be low, and if that’s correlated to civic participation more generally, then this may be the wrong platform to use for social reasons; young twitter users may be less likely to report such issues.
  2. Another assumption is that call center workers would welcome a new product. Call center workers may see this application as a complication to their job rather than a tool to help them do work more easily (even worse, they might view the app as making their jobs obsolete.)
  3. We assume that administrators will believe the cost of licencing our application will be outweighed by capital saved from fast, location-based, crowdsourced issue reporting. It could be the case that, although our product may improve circumstances, existing practices are good enough for a disinterested administrator.
  4. We assume that catering to data analysts will drive sales. It could be the case that a cool dashboard with lots of visualization features will be less useful to someone who’s ready to fire up a Jupyter notebook at a moment’s notice. Moreover, depending on the company, analysts may not have a say in IT licencing agreements, including subscribing to this product.