Lessons Learned from Implementation of Customer Requirements Solution

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is committed to maximizing the utility of its environmental data and is implementing efforts to document benefits and requirements of the data and information from its users. This effort is not only key to the management of NCEI’s product suite, but also supports identifying gaps and opportunities for innovation. While customer interaction is a core function, synthesizing and analyzing usage information from a central source has been and continues to be a challenge. To address this issue, NCEI has implemented a pilot roll-out of a web based customer engagement solution. The tool, complete with dashboards, data services, reports, and analytics is a step forward in establishing an initial perspective on the data usage. The implementation experience is also providing lessons learned and insights in developing a more comprehensive approach to data usage, benefits, and requirements identification.

NCEI’s engagement team is on the journey to building a process that garners more widespread internal stakeholder engagement to enhance interactions with customers and their use of the data. This discussion shares our experience in the implementation of this solution, the benefits and challenges, and current outputs of analytics that is informing some initial planning and engagement strategy.