SI-ASB-2009: Community IT Innovators (CITI)


Community IT Innovators (CITI) 1330 U Street, NW, Washington, DC www.citidc.com	Projects 1
Community IT Innovators (CITI) is an employee-owned company committed to helping social mission organizations effectively use technology. We combine expert technology services with a genuine commitment to make the world a better place. This commitment is based on our support for the missions of the organizations we work with, and a relationship of mutual respect.
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I had a great supervisor at CITI, Rob Jackson, who really went out of his way to make my time there valuable for him and me. I choose this project because it was a combination of technology and focus on social mission organizations which fit my desired career goals. It turned out I was working for the business consulting department, which might have once been a negative but now is very interesting to me. CITI is a great organization that seems to be ready to go through some impressive changes. These changes might very well come from Rob Jackson, my supervisor. He was an exceptional supervisor and provided a great place to work.

Projects

Needs Database

Interns: Zhe Liu, Daniel Fehrenbach

Code: CITI-01

Interns
2

In order to maximize the effectiveness of the complex-systems business model being utilized by the Business IT consulting group we need to develop a database of Client needs. The database will provide us with a baseline of data to evaluate the appropriateness of the technical solutions we develop for our Clients. We have a number of methodologies that can be adapted and applied to specific situations but we realize the need for an in-house knowledge base that will contain a range of qualitative scenarios that describe the Client's needs at Sales Intake. Once a solution has been developed and delivered we have Customer satisfaction surveys and project "post-partems" (as opposed to "post-mortems") that will give us a better sense of how well the solution met the Client need. But we don't have is a routine way of capturing and classifying Client needs during the Sales or Discovery process that we can easily compare against the post-solution information we collect. The data will be collected by asking existing and prospective Clients "What do you need?" This may be done over the phone or through a survey tool so the range of potential answers to this open ended question has the potential to take many forms. The goal of this project is to identify the most appropriate software application and the database structure to capture and use this needs data. We anticipate some research on best practices in this area but the lion's share of the work will be to collect the requirements for the needs database.

Qualifications: Requirements Gathering, Database Design, Marketing

The SI Alternative Spring Break is open to graduate students of the University of Michigan's School of Information. Undergraduates looking for Alternative Spring Break opportunities should look into the University of Michigan Alternative Spring Break program administered by U-M's Ginsberg Center.