TripleTen Externships: Bringing Actionable Data to Boston Public Library

Doing what you love and making the world a better place? What could be better?

TripleTen’s externships aim to achieve just this. They provide enthusiastic tech novices and career changers an opportunity to exercise burgeoning skills in their desired field — while also helping small businesses, public entities, and other reputable organizations grow and thrive.

If you’ve never heard of an externship before, think of them much like an internship: A short-term stint in the real world, tackling real-world problems, in tandem with a degree or certification (in the case of TripleTen, during a tech bootcamp). The only difference is that an internship is about being at a company — where you can be asked to do anything (including grabbing someone a cup of coffee) — while an externship is about tackling the tasks you were trained to handle. Basically, you’re taking your education into an external environment so that you can see your lessons in action, develop crucial workplace soft skills like communication and time management, and come away with a strong portfolio to showcase to employers.

So what does that actually look like? We sat down with TripleTen partner Keith Gillette, Boston Public Library’s Chief Technology Officer, who spearheaded its Business Intelligence Analytics externship, to learn what goes into — and comes out of — the experience. (Gillette is also the founder and CEO of TaskTrain, another one of TripleTen’s externship partners.)

The problem: manual data without granular insights

Before TripleTen, Boston Public Library (BPL) was already leveraging some data to understand community habits — but the overall process for collecting and analyzing it was very manual and lacked useful context. 

Using sensors at every entrance of its 26 branches around Boston, Gillette’s team could count how many people entered and exited a branch each month. They then entered that information into a shared Excel spreadsheet, which they referred to when advocating for support or measuring a branch’s effectiveness. “As a public institution, we don’t have a bottom line in terms of profit. Nobody’s paying us for our services. But that people are showing up to the library indicates that we are providing a service that they value. So knowing how many people come in your door is one of those key statistics that indicates that we’re fulfilling our mission, doing our job,” Gillette said.

Recently, the institution decided to invest in more advanced technology that could provide even more granular data. “We recognize that this is a very slow, cumbersome system. And so we transitioned to expand the number of networked people counters that we had in the organization, which will automatically report data back to a central database,” he explained. Instead of one data point — how many people visited a branch in a month — they now had access to various timeframes, be it visitors by minute, hour, or week. 

The problem was, they didn’t have any sort of system for making that data easily decipherable. “It doesn’t become useful to anyone until someone accesses it and uses it to make a decision,” Gillette said.

“More numbers are better — that means we’re reaching more people, or at least those users of the library who are coming in are taking advantage of our services more frequently,” he added.

With the help of TripleTen students, Gillette hoped to create a dashboard that was simple to read and use, highlighted the right information, and turned their data into meaningful actions. For example, he wanted any branch manager or employee to be able to answer questions such as, “How many people came in May of last year versus May of this year?” or “What are the busiest times of day, and how does that vary by branch location?”

“That analysis had not been possible for us at all before, and without a dashboard, it would’ve required our application team to go into the data and run a custom report,” Gillette said, adding that his team was already strapped for resources. “I have limited internal staff who can create these sorts of dashboards. They have a lot of other demands on their time.” Outsourcing the project, then, not only helped him reach his goal faster, but freed up his and others’ time to focus on other priorities.

The process: combining prototypes and feedback

To get started, students first needed access to BPL’s people-counter database, which was through Microsoft Power BI. Once BPL’s IT Application Manager had successfully connected students to the software, the cohort began brainstorming solutions.

“We had an initial presentation where each student had created a dashboard, and we gave feedback on that,” Gillette said. 

Through this process, they uncovered limitations in the data, which informed how they tailored their approach. For example, if they wanted to know whether a Tuesday was busy or slow, they needed to first track down the right timestamps, then convert those dates into days of the week. 

After a second round of feedback, they combined several of the students’ pitches into one solution. The final product, created over a couple months, became a single-page dashboard with controls to select a date range and then view graphs and charts of visitor activity for that time interval.

The result: an intuitive tool for budgeting, programming, and hiring

Gillette hopes to roll out the dashboard to staff soon, once BPL has finished installing all its people counters and is able to compile accurate data for every branch. “We are looking to push that ability to access the data out to a much broader group in the library,” he said. “So that’s the value that TripleTen provided.”

He’s excited about the ways accessible data can empower staffers to alter programming or innovate how they drive or maintain traffic. “Branch librarians put on programs, they put on story hours, they have guest speakers come in, they have drop-in workshops for learning a language or updating your resume — and so knowing the traffic times more than just anecdotally can be very valuable for scheduling that for maximum impact,” Gillette said.

He’s also interested to see how the dashboard informs recruiting. “We have staffing challenges, and making the case to the city with this granularity of data that we need more staff or we just need to shift our hours around within libraries is going to be very valuable,” he added.

One of the biggest things Gillette sees as a differentiator between TripleTen and other bootcamps is its commitment to mentorship and facilitating strong partnerships, even when the students are away from the classroom setting. “You’ve got professionals who are managing the relationship with the company and then actually supervising and coordinating the student work with the requirements that they’re given,” he said, adding, “There’s a level of support there that I haven’t seen with other externship programs.”

Discover our externships

Learn more about the experience with our ultimate externship guide — then, consider booking a call with our team today. We’d love to answer your questions and help you find your passion!