Jason Adams, former CEO of 4iQ Solutions, Discusses Why Industry Experience and Deep Data Sets Improve Damage Prevention
We recently talked to Jason Adams, former CEO of 4iQ Solutions and now Executive Vice President of Irth Solutions, after the company joined the Irth Solutions family.
4iQ was started in 2012 by experts in the damage prevention industry. Dig Safely New York, now UDIG NY, was the company’s first contract when they reached out about building a learning platform to educate more than 30,000 excavators. Today, UDIG NY and 13 other states use the platform to train excavators.
With his three decades of experience in the damage prevention industry, Jason offered an insightful look at why an unparalleled depth of data makes our solutions the best in the industry at helping prevent damage to critical network infrastructure and keeping everyone safe.
1: This team now has even deeper roots in damage prevention.
Our strength lies in our experience. Combined, we have hundreds of years of experience in the damage prevention industry — and the only developer recognized by CGA. There’s no other company in this industry with more experience than Irth Solutions.
2: A lot of shared knowledge — and data — in one place.
Simply put, we now have a pool of data that is unlike any other data set in the United States today. The value of our platform is understanding data related to the one call tickets, not just processing tickets. With our data, risk model and AI risk algorithms, there’s no other solution in the industry that has the level of sophistication and depth of data available.
3: Now more than ever, data is king.
With machine learning and AI, data is king. Machine learning is based on an if-then scenario. In our model, one call tickets are the “if” and something unfortunate like damage or a near miss is the “then.”
You can’t bake a great cake with bad ingredients. The same can be said for data. High amounts of data make for good ingredients when developing a solution to prevent or limit the damage done to infrastructure. We handle more than 100 million 811 tickets annually, and all tickets in 11 states. This creates a lot of data — a lot of good ingredients — and, therefore, the best solution for damage prevention.
4: Training and professional development are essential for risk management, and we offer that.
To keep up with heightened regulations, there is always a need for continued education. Our training platform is used for everything from onboarding new employees to running a certified excavator program in New York, with 30,000 users constantly interacting with it. You can’t be an excavator in New York without using our learning platform and taking the certified excavator program. Along with managing and tracking licenses, continuing education requirements and other professional development, our training platform helps customers deliver targeted employee training. The better trained your field technicians are, the less likely they will make a mistake that causes damage or a near miss.
5: Our ticket notification solution is safer than others in the market.
The quality of the ticket that comes out of our systems is the best because we use a custom-made geocoder, unlike most one call centers that use a commercial geocoder for tickets. We use parcel data and multiple lookups to identify dig sites and get the most accurate ticket to determine a safe digging zone.
