Game Changer: The Mitigation Analyst Tool

The National Mitigation Banking Association (NMBA) has a new tool in the works that swiftly turns mounds of data into high quality information that bankers can use when assessing the mitigation industry and making investment decisions. The tool will be available on smartphones, tablets and computers and is available only to NMBA members.

14 May 2013 | A new tool developed for the National Mitigation Banking Association (NMBA) will transform the way our members organize, view and interpret mitigation market data. The NMBA, in collaboration with member Trout Headwaters, Inc. and cloud software company Socrata, has designed and built a members-only data analyzer that is reliable, fast, and wholly interactive.

Meet Mitigation Analyst – available at mitigationanalyst.org – a new website available exclusively to NMBA members that takes hundreds of thousands of lines of raw data and transforms that data into useable information. This powerful system enables rapid ‘mash-ups’ of multiple databases, including U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ORM, RIBITS, and others. Rapid visualizations like graphs, charts, and maps take only seconds to produce, enabling a quick analysis of market conditions in a selected service area.

“Mitigation Analyst will truly facilitate better decision-making for our members by bringing together market data which has been historically very challenging to access,” says Randy Wilgis, the former President of the NMBA. “This tool enables our banking level members to compile and analyze market data to guide their investment decisions, and our affiliates can easily determine credit availability for their clients. The NMBA is excited to be working with Trout Headwaters and Socrata to develop this innovative and valuable tool for our members.”

With his first executive order, the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, President Obama ushered in a new era of open and accountable government. The President then backed up the order with the Open Government Directive, requiring federal agencies to take immediate, specific steps to achieve key milestones in transparency, participation, and collaboration.

“The increasing availability to public data has presented challenges, as these data sets become larger and more unwieldy,” says THI President and mitigationanalyst.org developer Michael Sprague. “While access to various government data is an important first step, making this data intelligent and useful represented a significant challenge. In that challenge, the NMBA found a significant opportunity to work with Socrata to build an interface that will create useful information from mounds of raw data.”

Seattle-based cloud software company, Socrata, focuses exclusively on democratizing access to government data. The company helps organizations improve transparency, and fact-based decision-making by efficiently delivering data in a user-friendly experience on web, mobile and machine-to-machine interfaces. Socrata’s innovations will make it easier for the NMBA to publish and manage both public and private data, and maximize the utility of data assets to make them universally accessible.

“I’m certain we’d all agree that getting ‘on the same page’ is a critically important step in finding solutions,” said Sprague. “I’d argue it’s almost impossible to derive a common understanding from large, dense data sets that cannot be easily and quickly analyzed and understood.”

Because data delivery capabilities will be simple and rapid, with easily shared outputs, going forward the NMBA will be able to spend more time acquiring new, better, and updated data sets, and significantly less time creating useful summaries and reports from the collected data.

MitigationAnalyst.org is currently in the beta testing phase. The NMBA will soon be providing our members access to these capabilities through devices including smartphones, tablets and computers.