Individual Assignment

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
NYC311

Submitted By

K Parikshith Nair
191229
MBA FT 19-21

Submitted To

Prof. Balakrishnan Unny

Date of Submission

23 September 2020
Summary and Key Points:

● NYC311 is basically a service created for dealing with non-emergency services and
access as a portal for resources of the government and departments of NewYork city.
(dial 311 on phone for non emergency services and information)
● Timeline is as follows
○ 2003 Started
○ 2009 Mobile App & Website
○ 2011 Social media awareness
○ 2017 Reach out to more public
● Services it provided were used by various departments, including Department of
Health, Housing and development and Department of Environmental Protection.
● Access its data for secondary source analysis & easy access to data to the public with
the help of technology.
● Predictive models to help Local governance. (weather , police department etc)
● Concern regarding the data not giving a holistic view, some segments missing.
● Access to the NYC311 is considered to be less aware to some segments of the society
- considered mostly used by affluent segments.
● Huge availability of data which is hard to analyse and hence needs a better way to
Visualize the data to make better use of it.
● Data can be accessed with a unique key - which will contain all the other details of the
service request.
● It helps the public get crucial information to make an informed decision in their daily
lives. Eg : to know from whom not to rent an apartment (worst landlord list).
● They plan to integrate IBM watson to answer better queries , NYC 311 answers
simple queries.

Problem Statement:

The biggest problem underlying in the NYC311 case is that some of the data is in a shadow.(
it is skewed) There might be specific segments of people whose data is not considered and
one more issue is the accessibility of data not bridging the digital gap, thus resulting in
inaccuracy of a source that is supposed to be a trusted source.
Analysis:

● Exhibit 2 clearly shows how complaints are varied throughout the day.
● Most complaints are during the noon/ day time hours and least amount of complaints
are during the early morning hours.
● Around midnight there is a huge rise in the number of complaints related to noises
and some types of complaints exist only during the day. ( for better allocation.)
● Such type of visualization can help us in understanding what type of information and
complaints are people using NYC311 for.
●
● In Exhibit 4 it clearly shows that service requests are more from particular regions and
not evenly spread and there are areas where the requests are near to nill ( request to
per capita ratio). So there needs to be somethings done to increase awareness and
accessibility to those regions
● Data is considered skewed and Biased as there seems to be missing segments. This
can only be overcome through more awareness and bridging the digital gap that is
there.

Suggestion and Recommendation /Conclusion:

● Proper classification of the segments into clusters and analysing it could help in
targeting which segments awareness is to be increased.
● More visualized outputs of Data would be more useful to understand as the source is
very large. (Worst LandLords list could be shown as List and then areas pop up after
that or region wise)
● Integration with IBM Watson to address more complicated queries is the right
direction NYC311 is moving to.
● Problematic conditions which have not been revealed until someone contacted NYC
is also a place where proactive measures are to be taken and more integration with
local departments is needed or a better way to access these issues.