How Japan’s Vaccine Locator Platform Became A One-stop Shop for COVID-19 and Vaccination-related Information
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Editor’s Note: David Moore, Founder and CEO of Navagis, shares his story of teaming up with the Google Maps Platform team to help people across Japan get vaccinated amid COVID-19 pandemic.
The roots of Navagis go back to Hurricane Katrina, when I led an Army Corps of Engineers team that deployed 3D mapping technologies with Google Earth to respond to critical needs on the U.S. Gulf Coast. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner we work across various industries and organizational types to solve location intelligence challenges with our software solutions.
The experience taught me how powerful mapping insights can be in protecting lives when disaster strikes. The COVID-19 crisis brought a brand new human challenge to the world and like other countries, Japan found itself struggling to vaccinate its 125 million people, while trying to communicate about where (and under what circumstances) people could get their vaccines.
Our end goal was to build a reliable, enriched, real-time dataset on Japan’s vaccination centers. Living in Japan, seeing some confusion and anxiety, I felt great urgency when I accepted the mission on behalf of our team.
From the very beginning we faced many challenges. Japan was experiencing unique difficulties in building an accurate real-time vaccine locator. First, we noticed the fragmentation of address information across thousands of local governments, from Hokkaido in the north to subtropical Okinawa in the south. Second, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare had launched a website of nationwide vaccination sites, which they were constantly updating data sources. We noticed the location information was prone to inconsistencies due to its dispersion at the local level, and different conventions among prefectures on writing addresses. In order to ensure the integrity of a massive amount of decentralized data, mostly in Japanese, we required on-the-ground presence and experience.
In addition, we needed to go beyond simply mapping the location of vaccination centers. Each one needed to be a one-stop shop for all information regarding vaccination, including opening hours, safety precautions, and qualifications for getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
Round-the-clock teamwork builds a helpful, informative mapping solution
People might think of mapping as all about AI, advanced satellites, and cloud computing power. Of course, these are essential. What is less known is the massive amount of human toil and dedication that goes into making vaccine location information available especially for an urgent health mission for a country as large and complex as Japan.
Realizing our task was urgent, we worked with the Google Maps Platform team across time zones and over weekends to make this happen fast. In some cases a vaccine center was at a place where one would not normally expect to get a vaccine—like a pop-up location at a convention center. So we matched vaccine center addresses from the government website against Google Maps Platform’s Places data.
In under two weeks, we had identified, matched and marked tens of thousands of locations as vaccination centers around the country. Moreover, the power of the Geolocation API and Places API enabled us to provide richer details for many of the centers.
One of the unique aspects of this project was being able to surface our work across multiple channels to accomplish a single goal. We were able to work with Google to ensure the vaccine centers appeared on the consumer user-facing Google Maps apps and website, with information to help citizens learn where and how to get their vaccine. Our team was in hourly contact with requests such as “this center is mission-critical, can we get it mapped?” They were able to quickly get the site listed and visible on the map for end-users. This was a big human mobilization.
Powerful mapping APIs for pinpointed vaccine location information
We couldn’t have accomplished the massive task of validating 35,000 vaccination sites in such a short period of time without Google’s mapping APIs. The Maps Geocoding API and Places API enabled us to take location data from the government website, and quickly verify whether the location existed, or not, with up-to-date places intelligence.
The Places API served a critical role in two ways: breadth of information (covering Japan’s entire territory), and depth of information (complex insight into each place, such as landmarks and phone numbers).
The ability to take the addresses provided by the government of vaccination sites, run them through the Places API, and assess the address quality helped enormously. Google Street View, meanwhile, provided a further level of validation, enabling us to visually identify the specific locations where errors remained, and manually identifying clinics and hospitals before identifying their precise latitude and longitude within cities in Japan.
Looking beyond COVID-19
Japan went from being a laggard in global vaccination rates before the summer of 2021 to one of the leaders, with nearly 80% of the population fully vaccinated. And, daily confirmed cases had been as low as 100 nationwide prior to Omicron emerging globally.
The prospect of putting to bed our adventure with the Japan Vaccine Locator couldn’t bring us more joy.
Except perhaps, the prospect of helping people rediscover the joy of a return to normalcy—in partnership with Google Maps Platform.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
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Workspace: Embedding Inclusion and Equity throughout Product Design and Development
Google’s products are built for everyone! Watch the video to hear what the experts at Google say about embedding inclusion throughout the design to product development process, and how Google Workspace is built on product equity principles that takes into consideration the challenges and requirements of users across demographics.
Google Dataflow Named Leader in The 2021 Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics
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We are excited to announce that Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 report. Thank you to our strong community of customers and partners for working with us to deliver a customer focused product. We believe Forrester’s recognition is an acknowledgement of our leadership across an integrated set of capabilities that rely on data to drive transformation. We were also honored to be named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021.
Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 across 12 different criteria and according to the report: “Google Cloud Dataflow has strengths in data sequencing, advanced analytics, performance, and high-availability. Google Dataflow’s sweet spot is for enterprises that have a preponderance of real-time data generated on Google Cloud Platform or wish to simplify all data processing by using a single platform that unifies both streaming and batch jobs.”
Harnessing the power of real-time data
The speed with which businesses are able to respond to change is the difference between those that successfully navigate the future and those that get left behind. In order to accelerate their digital transformation, reimagine their business and leverage the power of real-time data, today’s data leaders require a streaming analytics platform that provides both depth and breadth.
Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow, based on more than a decade of experience in internet scale systems for Google’s own needs, provide customers with a reliable, scalable, performant platform. In addition, we’ve designed these products for ease of use to make streaming analytics accessible to more users, which is why customers such as Sky and others from across all industries use Dataflow to run streaming analytics workloads.
5 out of 5 across key streaming analytics criteria
While Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 in 12 criteria, the product achieved the highest possible scores in areas that are top of mind for our customers.
We continue to be focused on solving problems that matter to you. For example, just in the last month we announced Dataflow Prime and Auto Sharding for BigQuery – two new auto tuning capabilities that bring efficiency and simplicity to your streaming pipelines.
Dataflow achieves highest score possible in strategy
With Google, organizations gain an industry leading product and a partner that has the vision and strategy to help you tackle new business challenges and provide delightful experiences to your customers.
In summary, we are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™, Streaming Analytics, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on your digital transformation journey.
Download the full report: The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 and check out these smart analytics reference patterns. To learn more about Dataflow, visit our website and get to know the product by taking an interactive tutorial. You can also watch recordings from the Data Cloud Summit event (May 2021), where we provided an in-depth view of new product innovations in Dataflow and other data analytics products.
Future of Work: What You Don’t Know Will Cost You
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The future of work is here—it’s just not evenly distributed. Indeed, many of the technologies, trends, and cultural norms that will drive tomorrow’s workplaces are already reshaping organizations around the world today. We examine this topic in a new Google Cloud report on the future of collaboration and productivity, featuring the results of original research, predictions by business and technology leaders, and recommendations from Google experts.
The report also identifies three important and impactful changes that businesses can make today to catch up with forward-thinking competitors. Here are the highlights:
1. Give people tools that help them save time and work faster.
What is it about work that just isn’t working? Research shows that employees around the world spend significant chunks of their day on low-value activities that get in the way of efficiency, productivity, and innovation. These include attending unnecessary meetings, managing high volumes of email, tracking down the right versions of documents, switching between applications, and generally struggling with outdated technology.
To help their employees spend more time on work that matters, future-minded organizations are replacing legacy business software with cloud-based tools that integrate seamlessly with one another and use automation to make routine tasks less burdensome. For example, an app might surface the right information at the right time so you don’t have to go hunting for it, suggest commonly used phrases as you type, or propose available meeting times and conference rooms. Add up the few minutes you save on each task, and that’s a significant portion of the day you’ve reclaimed for the work that matters.
2. Empower people to access knowledge and share ideas.
Have you ever used Google Search to find your own company’s logo? Or recreated content that already existed because you couldn’t track something down? Employees around the world experience similar challenges when searching for what they need across siloed, ineffective information repositories within their organizations. And that’s a problem, because nearly 80% of business leaders agree that seamless, digital access to knowledge is very important to overall performance, according to a survey sponsored by Google Cloud and conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.
The solution? Providing employees with centrally managed technology that lets them access and share knowledge more easily, curbing reliance on unsanctioned apps that may put sensitive data at risk. Fast access to relevant information can also help cultivate new opportunities for employees to contribute, whether it’s by suggesting a new product or service, providing feedback on internal processes or business initiatives, or exchanging insights with colleagues across the company. Eighty-nine percent of executives say that for a business to be successful, new ideas must come from everyone across the organization, from senior executives to front-line employees, according to another survey sponsored by Google Cloud and conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.
3. Let people work how they want: flexibly and collaboratively.
Along with time-saving tools and expanded access to information, two core values are reshaping work for forward-thinking organizations and will help determine the future success of every business: flexibility and collaboration. According to Deloitte research, only 17% of millennials are willing to stay with an employer for more than five years without the opportunity to work where they choose, while 74% of global employees believe that businesses perform better when they encourage teamwork.
Luckily, technology is evolving to support this sweeping shift toward flexible collaboration. We now have tools that let people on opposite sides of the globe work together as a team, from video meetings for face-to-face interaction to digital whiteboards for collective brainstorming. Research shows that more and more businesses are taking advantage of these cloud-powered services: 27% of global executives adopted integrated software suites for collaborative content creation and idea-sharing in the last two years, while an additional 24% plan to do so by 2021, according to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.
The Secret Behind How ATB Reduced Strategic Planning Time by 50 Percent
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ATB Financial (ATB) operates in a highly competitive financial services space, with competitors ranging from big banks to financial technology startups, ready to grab a slice of the provincial market share. To retain its competitive advantage in an industry primed for disruption, ATB took an active role in its evolution by intentionally transforming the way banking products and services could be delivered. Through this bold transformation, paired with customer-obsession, ATB is primed to make good on its commitment to deliver happiness to its customers by being more than a bank.
To address its goals, ATB launched a new initiative called “Work Reimagined” powered by G Suite, with the aim of helping employees save time, make decisions faster, and spend more time with customers to drive happiness. However, to succeed, ATB needed to equip its distributed, mobile workforce with modern productivity tools that would simplify employee communication and collaboration.
Remote employees often experienced connectivity and performance challenges with the corporate VPN, limiting their productivity. At the same time, legacy office tools did not foster innovation and often slowed business processes, delaying the company’s ability to deliver new services and respond to customer needs.
“We wanted productivity tools that would allow us to make time richer for team members in support of our customers and achieve 10x improvements rather than small gains. We chose G Suite because it enables employees to think and work differently,” says Lorne Rubis, Chief Evangelist, ATB Financial.
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Work beyond borders: How to use G Suite with Microsoft and your favorite third-party applications
The average enterprise uses 129 different applications on a day to day basis. These applications enable critical workflows that drive businesses forward. But when these apps don’t work well together that leads to lost time, frustration, and missed opportunities.
Professionals have access to dozens of applications in their organization. Apps like DocuSign, Box, or Trello can simplify individual processes and drive businesses to adopt newer ways of work. It’s really great that there seems to be an app specifically designed for what we need to get done for each task.
But there’s a downside to this proliferation of apps. The flood of notifications and disconnected processes frustrates users. Our work is spread across more apps than ever before, which inevitably leads to lots of apps switching, and reduces our ability to focus. Context-switching between applications cuts into time spent on value-additive work.
Learn how G Suite works seamlessly with Microsoft and other third-party applications to support key workflows, enhance collaboration, and help teams get to impact quickly.
*Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite.
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