106 THE POWER OF POSSIBILITY NISC | 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION AND MEMBER SERVICE MOSAIC: A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT DATA There’s a spirit of friendly competition at Mid-Rivers Communications in Circle, Montana. Everyone on the sales team knows who is racking up the best numbers and how many customers have upgraded to the Big Sky Bundle or the Hometown Bundle of services. But what makes the infor- mation most powerful — and motivating — are the easy-to-read trends and frequent updates, processed through one of NISC’s newest products, iVUE Mosaic. Continuous and current information provides a measure of trans- parency, says Mike Gross, Mid-Rivers Director of Sales and Marketing. “We want every employee to know what our goals are,” he says. “Every employee helps us obtain these goals, and they should be shared with everyone.” Mosaic is cloud-based software that makes it easy to turn data into charts, graphs and other visualizations. NISC Members can select from a library of NISC-created visualizations or create their own dashboards of key performance indicators, looking for trends and setting goals. An electric utility can track how long it takes to restore power after an outage. Telecoms can monitor their trouble reports or service orders. “Our goal with Mosaic is to simplify [data analytics] so that any user looking at data can build and create their own visualizations,” says John Weber, an NISC Product Line Manager. NISC convened focus groups in November 2015 to determine what features Members wanted, what types of data they wanted to analyze and how they would like to see it presented. Gross pushed for something extra from Mosaic — data to be as current as possible. He didn’t want to look at the results of the past month or week, or even by the day. The telecom- munications industry is incredibly competitive, and customers in rural communities expect and want the same high-speed internet that is as good as or better than what is available in urban areas. Gross plans to use Mosaic to make day-to-day decisions. For example, Mid-Rivers offers internet service in a unique product. With Wide Open Wi-Fi, customers pay $19.95 for unlimited speed and 20 cents per gigabyte of data. Customers can monitor their usage and cost through SmartHub, and Mid-Rivers can track the purchase of the internet plan and the patterns of data usage through iVUE Mosaic. Mid-Rivers can use Mosaic results to coordinate their technicians as they close service orders and customers make new service requests. With a territory of about 30,000 square miles — larger than the state of West Virginia — efficiency is vital. “We can be more agile,” says Gross.