Pittsburgh's SBA 8(a)
Annual Meeting 2010
Transcript

Good morning. I am Joanne Peterson from Abator, a 26 year old national IT services firm. I’d like to bend your ear a little bit about information.

We used punch cards from 1725 to the 1970s for tracking our critical information. Then we buried information in mainframe programs and hierarchical files before relational databases came along in the late 1980s.

Now we have data warehouses and exponential data growth.

  • In 2000 United States businesses created 2 billion gigabytes of data. Just so you know - one gigabyte holds all the volumes of a complete encyclopedia Britannica.
  • And, experts say we’ll double that amount of information every year – that’s over 1000 BILLION gigabytes for 2010.

Even as we create more and more information, we end up with incomplete and incomprehensible data that is anything but standard. Bad information is costing U.S. business about $600 BILLION annually.

We all need better tools to analyze our huge amounts of complex data, which leads us to Lolopop.

Abator was involved in a highway crash reporting project that required extensive data collection, warehousing and analytics. We were unable to find any commercial products that met all of our client’s complex needs for quality and responsiveness to changing regulatory compliance issues. So the team invented Lolopop, an automated data warehousing and business intelligence solution.

Some of Lolopop’s key components include:

  • Source of Authority (more about that in a minute)
  • Syllogistic Rules Engine. Syllogistic is a fancy was of saying “logical argument”; or if a+b = c then c = a+b.
  • Data Quality
  • Analytics
  • Standardized Elements

We regard the Source of Authority (SOA) for information as supremely critical. Our client determine the SOA for each type of information collected. This means that they know who or what application stored what data, where it came from and when. Then EVERY time that piece of data is changed, again they know absolutely by whom, where, when and what was changed. This put an end to data entry staff randomly changing critical information.

By standardizing the formats of data, Lolopop creates order from chaos.

All business intelligence products have tools to analyze information. Lolopop dynamically builds reports in a variety of ways:

  • Comparisons (time, location, or other conditions)
  • Trends by time periods
  • Significant counts, central or range values
  • Statistical or Topographical display
  • Exception alarms or triggers
  • Nonparametric Statistics (used when data is abnormally distributed or the sample is too small to be statistically significant)

A tool as robust as Lolopop often has a long and convoluted sales cycle. Lolopop is in beta test mode for the GetDiversityCertified web portal – a Turbo Tax-like software service expected to launch in December 2010.

Thanks for your time this morning. I hope you’ll visit the Lolopop.net site for more information, or give me a call at 412-271-5922 x101.