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In our modern world of superstores and one-stop shopping, it often becomes difficult to find good quality service
and people who know what they are talking about. Anyone can sell a widget. The burden is on the consumer to determine
if the vendor has the proper infrastructure and resources to ensure the widget is used properly.
Consider the difference in service between a large home-supply superstore and your local hardware store.
In the superstore, most of your time is spent just trying to locate the items you need and inevitably trying
to find someone who knows what products they sell and how to use them. In the local hardware store, the staff
knows exactly where everything is located, can often provide useful advice, and will recommend the best way to
finish a project.
Think about how many times you have to return to the superstore to purchase more materials or stand in lines to
make returns. Think about all of the additional frustration of hunting for parking spaces, standing in long
check-out lines, and having to wait when the check-out clerk spends "forever" looking up product codes in a
phonebook-sized reference because they did not scan properly.
If we add all the time, cost and effort it takes to complete a job when using a large superstore and compare the time and money spent
visiting the local hardware store, many of us would be amazed at the outcome. The small amount of added
convenience afforded by having everything available under one-roof for one-stop-shopping does not always
provide consumers the best possible value for their time, effort and investment. In fact, many of the super-stores
outsource delivery, installation, and maintenance to smaller companies that are better equipped to perform such work.
In the end, the consumer pays the additional overhead charged by the superstore to deliver the same product.
In today's marketplace, and particularly in post 9/11 activities, many of the "superstore" integrators supporting our
intelligence community, law enforcement agencies, and various other large-scale government programs represent a "generic"
capability. They characterize their abilities as all-encompassing, neglecting to inform their customers that there is
little-to-no experience behind many of their offerings when dealing with advanced technologies.
Of course, as they ramp-up service delivery, they incur time delays, additional costs, and less-than-adequate results.
These costs are unanticipated by the customer and undisclosed by the one-stop vendor.
Continued on VAI News page
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Visual Analytics continues to look to the future. Even as we enjoy the recent successful releases of VisuaLinks and
Digital Information Gateway, we continue to work on improving and enhancing our tools in order to provide the best
possible solutions to our user community.
As we are about to ship a maintenance release of VisuaLinks 2.0, we are also deep into the development of
VisuaLinks 2.1, which will provide a number of new features and usability-driven changes. See the
VisuaLinks News page
for an update as well as a feature article about financial analysis.
Our work on the capabilities of our Digital Information Gateway (DIG) product continues in
earnest with new and upcoming enhancements. These enhancements will further position DIG as
the premier information retrieval tool.
And, of course, the Visual Analytics staff continues to share its experience and expertise
through attendance and participation in conferences, symposia and work sessions.
See the VAI News page for details about upcoming events.
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Find out what has been going on with VisuaLinks since our 2.0 release in our VisuaLinks What's New article.
This month, we also look at financial crime analysis, with input provided by our friends at the IRS. See the VisuaLinks Feature of the Month for this interesting article.
Finally, we have included some more tips and tricks in our VisuaLinks Did You Know? section.
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See how we are expanding DIG capabilities, now and in the future, in our DIG What's New article.
See how you can use your DIG logs to your best advantage in our Feature of the Month.
Check out the tips and tricks in our Did You Know? section to make working with DIG even easier.
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VAI has been visiting Intelligence and Law Enforcement conferences this month.
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This is your section of our newsletter. Do you have an experience or tip that you would like to share with others? This is the place to do it. We would love to hear your feedback - on our tools, our newsletter, our Support Site - anything you would like to let us know about!
Please submit your feedback to newsletter@visualanalytics.com.
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