I’ve written before about the “Data for Good” movement, mostly in a disparaging way. Much of it has a sort of “noblesse oblige” feel about it, where businesses peel off a little of their time or product.
From my point of view, much of it is gratuitous and even counter-productive. Tech companies valiantly go forth and believe their technology can solve societal and humanitarian problems.
However, unlike developing pipelines to handle billions of bits of data or the perfect customer experience, real-world problems usually have very little data in comparison.
Sending a semantic search engineer out to build an application for a local food bank will result in a volunteer with no impact on something for which they have neither skill nor interest. These highly trained engineers may have no experience in capacity-constrained environments.
But lately, I've found a few bright spots in the "Data for Good" movement.
This is not exactly “Data for Good,” but there is a bright spot where “Tech for Good” can make a significant difference. In speaking with the BI software company Sisense recently, they arranged for me to talk with two of their clients who are using Sisense software to do noteworthy humanitarian things, in particular, saving lines.
First, a little plug for Sisense because they’ve been so gracious assisting me in finding something good to write. Sisense is a BI (Business Intelligence) software company with a somewhat different approach to BI compared to Qlik or Oracle, for example.They describe themselves as "an analytics platform for builders." Sisense told me that more than 50% of their business is embeddable and OEM BI. Their global customer count now numbers 2,000+.
Sisense combines data discovery, analysis, and intelligence with extreme scalability. With a back end powered by in-chip technology, it allows analysts to blend large datasets from a variety of sources into a single cohesive database. On the front end, users can craft visualizations, reports, and dashboards to collaborate and share information.
Two organizations I had the pleasure to interview were the Indiana Donor Network, and the Crisis Text Line.
Before 1984, organ donation was fragmented, and those in need perished due to a lack of coordination. A shadow organ economy existed where organs went to the highest bidder. In a bipartisan sense of outrage, Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law :
As a result, the formation of regional Organ Network operations followed. There are 58 today, roughly corresponding to states. In the case of Indiana, since it's northern border is opposite some Chicago suburbs, and their southern border is opposite Louisville, KY, the boundaries are logical, not political. When an organ is harvested, there is only a matter of hours before it can no longer be used for a transplant, so the territories are arranged more or less around population centers.
Here’s how it operates (and I’m leaving out some outlier cases). When a patient in a hospital within a network's territory reaches a "trigger" (an assessment that they are near death), a designated person in that hospital calls the Organ Network to alert them to the possibility of an organ donor with just necessary information.
In the case of the Indiana Donor Network (IDN), the operator uses Sisense to pull together a complete medical history from multiple locations (the Network has access to medical records of hospitals in its territory) in a matter of seconds.
