1) Where do you work and what is your job title? What is the purpose of the organization?
I work at Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions; my job title is Software Engineer II. We primarily use existing data from public records and other sectors such as government health care, and we provide solutions and insights to our customers about ways they can improve their businesses. Do you want an example?
Let’s assume that a bank wants to provide a credit card to a college student. College students usually possess scant data due to their age; those are called thin files. So, what our company does is to go through all existing data (examples like apartment rent history, tuition, car payments) and then they are able to figure out using their proprietary algorithms whether this college kid has the ability (based on an established score) to acquire that credit card. Therefore, that business will not lose a customer and the kid will obtain his desires. Evidently, the benefits are mutual.
2) Please name a project you have participated in implementing with the company in correlation with your career/job title or have orchestrated yourself.
So, I mentioned earlier how our business provides solutions to our customers, so our customers use those solutions which are basically like products (different products that identify the reliability and credibility of individuals towards individual company aspirations). Customers also possess products that are integrated with our own products (websites, apps, consumer report requests).
Our customers have products that integrate with our products. Our customers need to verify if their products are integrated successfully with our own. To do that, the basic rule of experimenting applies, all variables (in this case, no recent credit activity) need to remain constant in order to determine the product’s success (the consistency of the credit score being pulled every month). Our product fails if inconsistent scores are attained on a month to month sequence.
What I personally do is work on a project with a customer that provided fake records with a constant output such as a credit card score. For instance, one record would maintain a constant credit score for a lifetime. This is an essential factor for product testing for our customers. Test Seeds was the name of the project. This helped our customers maintain accuracy during the product testing, it has developed into a new service that we provide to our customers to facilitate their product testing phases.
(The answer above was stating how their organization integrates with their customers in providing data that is requested from their customers through software that was developed and implemented by her company. If a customer was to use a credit card application from a financial institution, they would be using the financial company’s personal products. However, those products are integrated with Lexis Nexis’s products or are purchased from them. To maintain effectiveness and accuracy, Lexis Nexis upgrades their software intermittently through development or new product implementation).
3) What IT applications has the firm recently implemented?
Docker
Docker is a way of containerizing your applications so that it can primarily plug and play your application. Basically, when software is created, the same environment needs to be applied in order for it to run for everyone and on all operating systems. Non-congruent software is made adaptable to function generally on multiple environments posing no format issue.
Another unnamed project that I have not been involved in but was presented by colleagues would be associating digital identity with physical identity to prevent identity or malignant online activity.
4) Were the most recent applications developed in-house, were they outsourced development or were they application software packages that were customized and purchased?
A little bit of all three, for instance dockers is open sourced and is available for purchase (insinuating that the software was customized and purchased). However, this software is evolved in-house and outsourced to third party companies as well.
5) How much time do you spend gathering requirements?
Per project, gathering requirements equals 4-5 hours. That comes with a reason, Requirements in such a large-scale company, projects are divided into six subcategories: requirements, design, implementation, quality assurance testing, and deployment (providing to customer). There is one phase to which people are dedicated to finding requirements. As an engineer, when I receive the requirements from the first phase I literally only must do 4-5 hours of work due to the fact that info is sequentially propagated.
6) How much time do you spend researching software options?
Per project, this would consist of 2 weeks of intense research of the software options, then we would implement the research with the one we found best suitable. We would create a prototype shortlisting 2 software options, create several prototypes with these options, eventually narrowing it down to the most effective and efficient outcome.
7) How much time do you spend documenting this research?
2- 3 hours per project.
8) How much time do you spend training clients about these solutions?
Training the people with software created per project is provided alongside every software upgrade which occupies 3-4 hours per software upgrade. I only work with a handful of software upgrades. With every upgrade the users (clients), must be trained on the additions and subtractions.
9) How much time do you spend customizing existing software?
If it’s a new software its extremely frequent due to the preliminary inevitable existence of bugs and required enhancements. Contrarily, if it’s a software that is being maintained, much less frequently. At that point the software is sufficiently stable.
Visionary Writing 