Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Vered Holzmann and Ben Holzmann
knowledge in a political campaign that runs for only a few months is devastating since the campaign
is a relatively short-term endeavor, where any sensitive wrong decision, made based on inaccurate
information, can cause not only inefficient effort allocation, but may be directly responsible for a fatal
error that might lead to a total failure.
4. Case study: The campaign for mayor
The following case study demonstrates the process of managing data, information and knowledge in
a political campaign. The city is located ten miles south of Tel Aviv, which is the largest metropolis in
Israel. It has 270,000 inhabitants eligible to vote in the mayoral race. An initial survey revealed that
the city is extremely segregated and most of the old parts of the city that house people of middle to
low income, do not support our candidate. Based on a series of surveys, extensive archived data
mining, and a thorough investigation of the available knowledge structure, we further understood that
socio-demographic characteristics will dominate the preferences of the citizens’ decision making
process. Thus, we planned a campaign that focused on a solid commitment to perform a drastic
change in the taxation methodology introduced by the previous mayor. We had the advantage of
attacking the performance of a mayor in office and could offer a management revolution, so we
developed a strategy that initiated a desire for a revolution and fuelled the people’s expectations until
Election Day. Our campaign management team consisted of an operations manager, an information
manager, a manager in charge of the volunteers, a manager in charge of advertising and a political
expert. We had a total of 60 working days, but we assumed a ten day loss, so we set all efficiency
and effectiveness performance tests on a production of an average gain of new supports per day for
the duration of the campaign. The number of supporters required was estimated based on the
assumption that the percentage of voters that will actually come to vote will be similar to participation
in previous elections, thus we estimated a turnaround of 150,000 voters, out of which we need 75,000
on our side in order to win. But we further estimated that we cannot expect more than 70% of our
supporters to actually show up and vote. Hence, we decided to set the goal of collection for at least
110,000 supporters, or 2,200 new supporters per working day. We never gained 2,200 new voters
during one single day, but the accumulative value did not deviate from the target by more than 3%
throughout the campaign. Our methodology was based on creating social networks that contained
groups of homogenous members with a common interest in an issue that received a direct publicized
attention from our candidate. Municipal social networks were based on preferences for an education
system in elementary schools, resistance to road interchange construction, etc. The system promoted
within the various groups expectations regarding their preferences and encouraged them to support
the candidate. Every network was initiated either by a volunteer or by a hired professional who
enticed friends or colleagues to join the group on the basis of their mutual interest rather than a
common believe in the candidate. These friends and colleagues continued the process, through the
initiation and assembly of sub-groups, until the group reached 150 members. The information team
recorded and updated the data for each one of the members into a database and produced daily
reports indicating the status of the various allocated measurements. When a group reached saturation
it was assigned to a manager who was responsible to persuade and assist each one of the members
to come and vote on Election Day. During that day we monitored the actual voting in each ballot-box
and identified groups that did not meet the target numbers. In such cases we increased pressure on
the group manager to bring sufficient number of supporters to vote. In cases where this was not
applicable, we diverted the pressure towards group leaders that had already proved themselves as
efficient agents and we asked them to take an extra effort to bring supporters to actually vote. The
system worked and we won the election.
5. Discussion and conclusions
The political arena is new to the information management body of knowledge and suffers from a gap
in related literature (Rohrschneider, 2002). Hence, it offers a substantial variety of research and
implementation opportunities for information management professionals. The political campaign is a
project of a very unique nature: it is short and aggressive, mainly based on volunteers, and it requires
intensive professional work in order to succeed. Thus, it represents an array of interesting job
opportunities in the various fields of management in general and in the field of information
management in particular and provides adequate data for academic research.
Throughout our research we found very little academic literature and encountered a rather serious
lack of empirical procedures or investigating tools to guide managers participating in most aspects of
communication within the political arena. We found literature discussing the issues of data mining and
classifications as a catalysis agent in advancement of customer relationship analyses methods (e.g.,
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