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Quality: A Focus on Product Quality

BroadMap’s Quality team is passionate about their work, which affects every department of the company. A key aspect in our quality program is our focus on product quality. The team checks for quality in both BroadMap’s end products as well as throughout the production environment. They define quality gates in various parts of every process flow and track the quality of data from its source to its use in BroadMap’s products, services and solutions. Every time BroadMap’s data is updated there is a chance to improve or sacrifice quality, and the team creates programs to check for quality automatically and recursively. These programs contain regression checks that consistently compute and compare summary statistics against benchmark data to ensure that changes and edits to the data are always as designed.

At designated times throughout the day, BroadMap’s quality programs automatically check to verify if the data is compliant to its specification and its quality has not been degraded. If any errors are detected, the software sends a report to the engineers, project lead and quality control technicians who can elect to manually correct any confirmed errors. Any significant issues are logged into our issue tracking system to ensure that the root cause of the problem is identified, and the problem is managed and corrected at the core. Quality team members check for spatial and attribution errors in the data, which might include naming or other content errors. All efforts are made to insert quality checks throughout all departments so that no errors are found during the final product testing. In addition, multiple tests are performed on BroadMap’s products before they are released to our customers.

The Quality team is continuously improving and adding to the quality suite of checks that are deployed today across all of our products and services. The team continues to work on quality checks for our Map Connect™ Enterprise suite of products as well as on enhancing our approach to meeting the needs for round two of the national broadband mapping initiative. Furthermore, the Quality team is working hand-in-hand with our development teams on all new products, services and solutions.

GIS Analyst Team Update

BroadMap’s team of GIS analysts has several large projects in the works, including preparation of the company’s deliverables for the second official deadline of the nation’s Broadband Data Improvement Act (BDIA). Though the official due date has moved from September 1 to October 1, 2010, the GIS Analyst team is working with the baseline maps and broadband provider coverage area data gathered during our first round of efforts for our five U.S. State and three U.S. Territory broadband mapping customers. The GIS analysts are now comparing our maps to those purchased from third-party data providers, verifying accuracy, finding any discrepancies and working to improve our customers’ maps overall.

With so many prospective customers inquiring about BroadMap’s enterprise GIS capabilities, it is often the job of the GIS Analyst team to support the company’s sales efforts by creating sample datasets. Currently, several large companies are evaluating BroadMap’s capabilities and are considering moving to our MapConnect™ Enterprise map data. The GIS Analyst team helps BroadMap’s sales account directors to share the compelling reasons about why it is easy to make the switch from a prospect’s old, "sun-setting" products to BroadMap’s MapConnect™ Enterprise data. By aligning their current datasets to BroadMap’s and showing how things would look if and when they make the switch, the team is confident that prospects will see the proof for themselves and be eager to work with BroadMap.

The GIS Analyst team is also working on some development aspects of future BroadMap products. This includes working on the feasibility of aligning data, conflating datasets and backing up the Engineering team as new, more fully-automated GIS solutions are proposed.

Employee Spotlight

Jeremy Lewis—GIS Analyst

Jeremy Lewis’ ancestors settled in and around Chicopee, Massachusetts when the area was still pastoral and focused on agriculture. Chicopee is now known as the "Crossroads of New England," and though Jeremy thinks fondly of the native people who originally named the area and of his own great-grandparents, grandparents and other family who were there before him, he decided that Chicopee’s recent growth and urban development were not for him. As a result, he studied forestry at the University of Massachusetts where he received a diverse education in everything from geography and biology to economics and public policy. It is also where he first began to hone his GIS skills and to seek a new life away from where he had grown up.

With his preference for wide-open spaces and the quiet of mountains and forests, Jeremy first accepted post-college work for a private landowner in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. Though he used aspects of his GIS training in his early forestry work, it was not until later that he truly connected with his passion for GIS. “I saw a job listing for GDT that included the word ‘geocoding’ and I remembered that one of my professors had predicted enormous growth in the field of geocoding work. A lot of things clicked into place for me, and I knew my future work path would be in GIS.”

Jeremy’s work at GDT ultimately led him to BroadMap. “I was really excited to be a part of a small startup company,” said Jeremy. “I love that I’m encouraged to find creative solutions to support our company’s engineering efforts, and the potential for growth and development are great.”

With a young, growing family, Jeremy stays busy at home in his spare time. He also helps to care for their eight hens and two roosters so that his family can enjoy fresh eggs, though he has to watch out for weasels so that the birds are not harmed. With an organic dairy farm nearby, Jeremy enjoys many of the pastoral elements of his neighborhood. He also likes climbing the area's “4,000 footers”—the name given locally to the peaks in northern New Hampshire and Vermont—and has “bagged about half of them.”

Nick Cihak—Chief Growth Officer

Nick was the first person ever in his immediate or extended family to apply for and be accepted to university. After a week of orientation and class preparation at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Nick was called to the registration office and asked when he was planning to pay his tuition. After several frustrating attempts to work through this, he became disenchanted with the entire experience and volunteered for the United States Army to take advantage of its guaranteed educational benefits. At this point Nick had only ever lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, seen very few business cards, never been on an airplane and had only owned one car. Nick has seen a lot of changes since then: living in 17 different cities in the U.S., Canada and Europe; performing and managing IT and advisory services for over 200 different clients; accumulating nearly 3 million air miles; and owning 27 different vehicles. As Nick states, “The only thing that has been constant in the last 29 years of my work and academic life is change, the culmination of which has prepared me for the dynamic role of building and leading Sales and Product Management for BroadMap.”

Nick prepared early in his work life for change by volunteering for the U.S. Army. As an infantryman he graduated from Ranger School, served in an Opposition Force capacity in Germany and attending the United States Military Academy Preparatory School, opting not to attend West Point. The discipline, objectivity, leadership and adaptation skills Nick developed during his military service have served him well in both academic and professional pursuits. According to Nick, “The single most enduring legacy from my military experience was developing an appreciation for planning, execution, duty, honor and country.”

Following his military service Nick attended Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point and Milwaukee. Although he spent a majority of his time in engineering studies, Nick opted to finish his degree in Allied Health Administration as a means to more quickly enter the workforce and begin a life with his wife of 23 years and counting. After working for a period in the health insurance industry, Nick applied for and was admitted to the Systems Engineering Development Program at Electronic Data Systems (now Hewlett Packard). Nick completed the challenging two-year, multi-phase, on-the-job and pass/fail classroom curriculum to achieve his Systems Engineer certification, while providing systems integration and data development services for the General Motors Treasury Office. Since then he has held service delivery and leadership roles at several management and IT consulting firms. While serving in one of these roles and living in Glen Allen, Virginia, Nick and his family became backyard neighbors with Daniel and Holly Perrone. This relationship is now over 10 years old, having endured trampoline accidents, Skip Barber™ Racing School, family weddings and numerous lettuce-wedge salad courses. Most recently, Nick spent over five years in the PricewaterhouseCoopers Business Advisory Services organization as a leader for Business Performance Improvement and ERP consulting services in both their New York City and Dallas, Texas offices.  

Now, working for BroadMap, Nick welcomes the challenge of driving value and business growth for clients with BroadMap’s products and services. Nick states, “This new role leverages my experience in advancing solutions that improve performance and create value in the field of human capital. When I look at the experience, knowledge and expertise of the BroadMap team, I can think of no other organization that has done a more compelling job of addressing the human capital formula for success.”