Women, Political Stagnancy, and Civic Engagement in Pittsburgh
This proposal for a program implementation is targeted at the Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy. The goal of the program is to investigate underlying attitudes among adult female citizens towards the political stagnancy in Pittsburgh. It will seek to determine whether these citizens perceive the political situation as stagnant, if they feel that they are resistant to change, if they believe that Pittsburgh is outperforming comparably-positioned cities, and if they feel like they can make meaningful political changes on the city and county level. The goal of the project is to help the Pennsylvania Center for Women, Politics, and Public Policy understand how to motivate greater female participation in the local political process in order to implement positive female-oriented policy changes.
Continental Airlines Go Forward Strategy and Real-Time Data Warehouse
The overarching objective of the Go Forward Strategy was to continually accelerate the gains made in customer relationship management (CRM), customer service, operations and the maintenance, repair and overhaul of their jets. What Continental was after was the ability to unify their entire operation into a highly integrated, coordinated customer-based platform that could be used for streamlining every aspect of their operations to exceed customer expectations and deliver exceptional value (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). The Go Forward strategy further galvanized Continental unto a very focused strategy for ensuring their Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) turned into a Powerful catalyst for customer-driven change (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006).
The $30M investment in the Go Forward Strategy was one of the most effective investments in technology any airline has ever made in technology, with Continental netting a gain of $500M in increased revenue and cost savings. In the first year alone, Continental was able to eradicate $7M in fraud and drastically reduce the threat of bankruptcy. In addition to all of these benefits, the company skyrocketed in customer experience ratings and customer satisfaction polls, becoming over time the most respected and favored airline (Watson, Wixom, Hoffer, Anderson-Lehman, Reynolds, 2006). Another significant benefit was the ability to integrate many diverse sets of customer, financial and operational data into a single system of record, which gave Continental a very significant competitive advantage over competitors. With the depth of analytics and business intelligence that Continental Airlines has been able to achieve, they are transforming intelligence and knowledge into a competitive strength which is the most advanced and mature level of analytics decision making there is (Cunningham, Il-Yeol Song, Chen, 2006). All of these benefits are also allowing the Continental culture to heal from three bankruptcies and become stronger as a result, which has also given the entire company a chance to resurrect itself and serve customers more effectively than ever before.