Technology

About Enhanced Horizons Technologies

The Governance & Accountability Institute, Inc. has a range of products and services that the Institute team has bundled together in a technology package offering -- “Enhanced Horizons Technologies.” 

We tend to use open source software, which can be customized and fine tuned for our own and our clients’ technology and communications needs.  At the root level most of our services run on a combination of the PHP programming language, MySQL databases, the Apache Web server, and the Linux operating system. 

We have our own server farm and also utilize our technology partners’ resources and facilities for hosting (Web sites, intranets, extranets, and other applications).

We continue to conceive of and create new and unique products and services utilizing the resources of our powerful open source base technologies, and continually expand our technological expertise, knowledge base, staff / team know how, and consulting partner know-how. 

The Enhanced Horizons Technology suite of powerful services is always one step ahead of the curve, helping our own team and our clients to “look over the horizons…” to get ahead and stay ahead, no matter the application. Thus – “enhanced horizons!”

Web Content Management System

Most of our websites run on a modified version of the open source Typo3 content management system (CMS).  Our in-house content management system allows us to monitor, search, scan, collect, organize, and disseminate large amounts of research, commentary, news, photos, videos, and other important information for our internal use, as well as our readers in our two powerful public Web platforms (Accountability Central and Community Investment Network), as well as for client projects.

Since this CMS is open source, we have developed many custom “extensions” for the system.  One such extension was created for our publishing partnership with the Lexis Nexis© Publisher service.  We developed a custom interface which allows our editors and research team to research, monitor and publish news from around the world -- from newspapers, wire services, Web sites, magazines, trade journals, broadcast news, and many other sources.  Our extensions greatly decrease the amount of time it would normally take to accomplish these tasks, and allows our team to have a wide list of reliable sources to deliver better information to ourselves, our readers, and our clients. (One example of our innovation.)

Web 2.0 Features

Our Enhanced Horizons Technologies approach deploys many “Web 2.0” or community / social networking aspects of the World Wide Web and the Internet.  Our services include everything from Blogs, social networking sites, commenting systems, rating systems, tag clouds, and various other communications and information-sharing methods that help to make our own Web sites a two-way interaction between users and the site editors.

Our technologies are designed to enable and empower conversation, feedback, community building, and collaboration on the Web. 

Customized Intelligence Gathering Techniques

The Governance & Accountability Institute utilizes the Enhanced Horizons Technologies platform to access to literally thousands of reliable information and news sources around the world.  These sources include daily and specialized newspapers; consumer, trade and specialized magazines; a range of newsletters; Web sites; books/authors; blogs; television programming; public sector sources; multinational organizations; and more.  Our intelligence gathering techniques combine automatic retrieval using algorithms, and manual research using the “boots on the ground.”  The results are often utilized for customized research for clients in the corporate, public and social sectors.

On-line Training Software

The Enhanced Horizons Technology platform supports interactive on-line training programs which can be done from any Web browser.  The training can be animated and interactive with different pathways based on actions the trainee has taken.  Using our software programming we can immerse the user in a situation, receive their response, and then either congratulate them on a job well done, or explain how they should have reacted.  We can follow the user all the way through tracking his/her success, and allowing a true learning experience.

Customer Relationship Management / Stakeholder Relationship Management

Using our list and email management programs we can communicate with people who matter to you – customers, clients, prospects, third parties, referral sources, employees, partners, and more.  Our systems track, store and retrieve data and information that you might need on a particular group of contacts, and allows for customized newsletters and mailings to the entire group or a subset of that group (some subgroups could be location, age group, position, company, etc) and small individual lists. 

The system allows you to track the effectiveness of your communications by letting you know just how many people opened the email that you sent.  The tracking software can also tell you which links were clicked on the most in the email, and it can even tell you who clicked through, and on to what link.  This allows you to further tailor and customize your message, and also can help to show who is really interested and who is not, to take further action.