IS428 2016-17 Term1 Assign3 Lim Kim Yong
Background
After the successful resolution of the 2014 kidnapping at GAStech’s Abila, Kronos office, GAStech officials determined that Abila offices needed a significant upgrade. At the end of 2015, the growing company moved into a new, state-of-the-art three-story building near their previous location. With their move into the new building, GAStech has introduced a new initiative to tighten their security procedures.
GASTech has installed proximity detectors throughout the building to enhance the safety and security of its employees. Staff members are given and encouraged to put on proximity (prox) cards while in the building. There are two types of proximity sensors, fixed sensors that register when a badge crosses a boundary and a mobile sensor reader, nicknamed Rosie, which identifies and records any prox cards in the vicinity she travels in.
Besides, the new office is built to the highest energy efficiency standard, but as with any new building, there are still several HVAC issues to work out. The building is divided into several HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) zones. Each zone is instrumented with sensors that report building temperatures, heating and cooling system status values, and concentration levels of various chemicals such as carbon dioxide (abbreviated CO2) and hazium(abbreviated Haz), a recently discovered and possibly dangerous chemical.
Objectives
With the massive amount of data being collected by the various sensors, there's definitely no way any GAStech employee can deal with the data to discover relationships or patterns without using any visualization tools. Hence, using all the visualization and analytical technique that I have learned in class, I aim to create an interactive data visualization to help GAStech management to be able to see patterns/identify anomalies/connections to better understand its operations in order to make better and informed decision.
With this interactive visualization, departments such as Security will be able to keep track of employee movements within the building to ensure that they are safe and also to prevent any unauthorized access to areas/zones that are prohibited. Furthermore, facility managers and executives could possibly identify areas that can improve the office environment such as to save costs and also to provide a conducive working environment for all GAStech employees.
Information Gathering
Looking at the given description of this challenge, there are some key information mentioned that are helpful and critical for my investigation.
- Staff members are required to wear proximity (prox) cards while in the building.
- The building is instrumented with passive prox card readers that cover individual building zones.
- Rosie – a free robotic mail delivery system is equipped with a mobile prox sensor, which identifies the prox cards in the areas she travels through.
Based on the given data, like any visualization processes, it is imperative and critical to understand and look through the data before using any visualization software. I will be using Tableau as my visualization software and there are some work to be done on the given datasets before I plot my visualizations.
Data doesn’t always come ready for analysis. As many of you have experienced, some data needs a lot of work before it can be sensibly analyzed. To begin with, Employee List provided names in the format of Last Name and First Name. Therefore, the first thing I did to better identify these people, I used the Excel CONCATENATE () function to join all of them into a unique single column called Full Name (First Name – Last Name) format. This is because among the employees there are people with similar first or last names.
