Developing an Emergency Response Tool

What problem was NYC looking to solve with CARTO?

One of the main things we’ve been trying to do ever since Hurricane Sandy, is scale our ability to do analytics immediately after a disaster and a preparedness for a disaster. And one of the big challenges we’ve had is finding a way to teach more analysts how to make maps and do geospatial analytics. So what was really our focus for CARTO is finding easy to use tools that we could teach any analysts to use so that we could more quickly visualize our data and use it to inform response.

How did CARTO help you solve this problem?

Well CARTO is easy and beautiful. It very clearly fits into a sort of new set of modern software tools, if you want, call them self service or just cool, but you know that analysts like to use them. What was really important for us is not only that we found a way to teach anyone how to make maps and do spatial analysis but also to help them have fun with their jobs, so that was a big win for us.

What have the results of using CARTO been?

Really building a skillset across the agency and across the city for just doing more analysis, including location analysis. I think for us, we were a legacy SaaS agency and so it’s been very important that all of our analysts, and the people who understand the data best, are able to analyze it in any way possible and to visualize it. One of the things we’re trying to get away from is segmenting our analysis by a specific type of tool. So it’s very exciting for people who maybe are used to analyzing their data in tables to then also be able to visualize it.

Why CARTO?

Apart from being fast, flexible and easy, we looked at a number of tools and most of them out there take a really long time to learn and they just, it’s not as fast at being able to put something together quickly and then to share equally.

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