Online Program

Friday, February 20
CS04 Software for Analytics and Data Mining Fri, Feb 20, 9:15 AM - 10:45 AM
Maurepas

Taming the Big Data Beast at Texas Parks and Wildlife: Using Business Intelligence Tools and Value-Added Data to Evolve a Culture of Data-Driven Decisionmaking (303053)

Alejandro Farias, Administrative Resources Division Texas Parks and Wildlife Department 
*John Taylor, Texas Parks and Wildlife 

Similar to private businesses, funding for resource management and conservation efforts by natural resource agencies, such as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), comes from revenue generated by customer interactions (fishing and hunting licenses, boat registrations, park visitation fees, magazine subscriptions, etc.). TPWD has developed a business intelligence (BI) system—the License Utilization and Revenue Enhancement System (LURES), which consolidates the agency’s licensing point-of-sale system and other revenue-related databases to support enhanced understanding of customer interactions with the agency—in an attempt to improve customer service and retention, as well as the agency’s finances. This comprehensive analytics system integrates SAS BI software, linking each customer’s purchasing patterns across agency databases with ESRI software to provide geospatial visualization and analyses of customer demographic profiles to identify the most effective marketing strategies to reach individual customers, as well as neighborhoods with demographic groups targeted for new-customer recruitment efforts. This effort has faced challenges with each of the “Three Vs” that define Big Data: volume, velocity, and variety. This presentation will highlight some of the useful tools and methodologies we have implemented to address these problems, such as data integration, data warehousing, OLAP, and other BI technologies. Additionally, it will describe how we are leveraging the concept of “value-added data” to tame our Big Data, develop a culture of data-driven decisionmaking, and evolve our organizational intelligence capabilities from simply providing centralized data storage and reporting to providing actionable insights from predictive and location analytics.