YOUR FIRST MACHINE LEARNING PROJECT
EXCITING TRENDS IN CLOUD DEVELOPMENT Q&A WITH THE CREATOR OF THE RAP INDEX
CLOUD SERVICES: CHANGING THE SOF T WARE DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY FOREVER
ISSUE FOCUS
WORK THAT IMPACTS OTHERS
C O N T E N T S
The Kopis Edge
Conten •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
T A B L E
O F
•
1
2 7 9
/
T H E
K O P I S
From the CEO's Desk A N D R E W K U R TZ
Your First Machine Learning Project
J O N ATH A N F O W L E R
Work that Impacts Others
D AV I D F R I E D L I N E
E D G E
13 17
Exciting Trends in Cloud Development Q&A with Chip Felkel, Creator of the RAP Index AD AM D R EWES
Copyright @2018 by Kopis and The Brand Leader. All foreign and U.S. rights reserved. Contents of this publication, including images, may not be reproduced without written consent from the publisher. Published for Kopis by The Brand Leader.
nt
CEO’s Desk
Kopis Welcomes Smart Government Team to the Family BY A N DR EW K U RT Z
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
ANDREW KURTZ PRESIDENT & •CEO • •
I’m excited and enthusiastic about what the Kopis team has in store this quarter— both in terms of what we’re working on internally and the new solutions we’re putting in place for our clients. First, for what we’ve got going on internally at Kopis. We want to bring you up to speed on a beneficial new addition we made recently in order to grow the Kopis family and provide more service offerings for our customers. On January 16, 2018, Kopis acquired the NWN Smart Government team, formerly TiBA Solutions, an experienced team of senior developers with breadth and depth of knowledge in the public sector.
andrew.kurtz@kopisusa.com •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
2
D E S K F R O M
T H E
C E O ' S
The Smart Government group is a SC-based team that has developed some amazing solutions that help communities expand the electorate, create better voter registration systems, and get more out of their social services programs. As you might imagine, this kind of work is difficult and time-consuming without the right technology. The Smart Government team has spent the past 18 years helping government agencies manage the data and develop the capability to perform these services that are so vital to our community as efficiently and as effectively as possible, so that they can provide the most benefit at the lowest cost to our citizens.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
3
Not only does this acquisition make Kopis one of the largest and most experienced software development groups in the region, it also complements our historically private-sector work, brings some new IP to our company that will help us start closer to the end zone with future projects, and represents a great cultural fit and tech stack fit for our existing developers.
We are truly thrilled to be able to introduce our expanded team, which will enable us to do more good for more people— especially for the businesses and citizens of South Carolina.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
F R O M
Rolling Out Cloud-Based Solutions for Our Customers
T H E
While we’re on the subject of doing more using fewer resources, recently our team has been spending a lot of our time working on cloud-based solutions for our customers, which is why we’ve decided to center the theme for this edition of The Edge around the cloud and, specifically, Azure.
C E O ' S D E S K
Cloud services are not necessarily a new technology but a new architecture.
What we’re usually talking about when we talk about these cloud services is not necessarily a new technology but a new architecture. Where appropriate, we’re helping our customers shift the architecture of their existing solutions, whether public or private, away from the traditional server model and toward solutions that have been built on powerful, expandable, elastic systems based on cloud services like Azure.
While there is an initial cost to shift services over, cloud services have a lot of advantages that make them appealing to enterprises. First, using cloud services for your architecture gives your solution built-in scalability, whether you’re creating a consumer-facing or internal application.
On top of that, cloud solutions offer impressive existing functionality through microservices that provide certain capabilities.
Companies used to have to design and build the system, and then manage a system that could handle the peak volume, not the average volume. This has always been problematic, especially for businesses that have a cycle, or that are seasonal, where demand skyrockets at a certain time. Historically, these businesses have had to build out and manage an environment year-round for these peaks, creating a lot of wasted resources, a lot of downtime and unused bandwidth.
Take, for example, machine learning. Traditionally, building this functionality into a solution meant significant infrastructure investment just to get to your first request, which would make including it a difficult decision for most companies, even if they really need it. Now, with cloud services, your development team can start out with machine learning, security models, telemetry, analytics, and so on already available without having to build or integrate these functions into the existing architecture.
Now, with cloud-based architecture, we can build out a system with automatic elasticity in an environment managed by the cloud provider, like Microsoft, and built for uptime. This reduces the load for your company both in terms of building the upfront infrastructure and in terms of the ongoing effort to manage the system—this is a significant cost upside.
This existing functionality not only accelerates the build, because it starts you halfway down the field, so to speak, but it also changes the capital requirement to get started, making these capabilities accessible to a much broader audience. To me, the accelerated timeline and reduced initial capital investment has the biggest impact on small businesses and start-ups—
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
4
D E S K T H E
C E O ' S
they can now incorporate large enterprise capabilities as part of their solutions and have these powerful capabilities based from the ground up on available cloud services, built out of the box for scalability and manageability.
F R O M
Large corporations have always been able to build the functionality they need, because they have the capital. But think about all the small businesses and start-ups that have had innovative solutions without the capital or human resources to implement. I think we’re going to see a lot of gamechanging solutions from some surprising sources come out in the next few years as cloud-based services become the standard.
The final major benefit of cloud-based services is rapid prototyping. I believe we’re poised to see the cloud do for the software development space what 3D printing did for the manufacturing industry. Cloud services enable us to get to version 1.0 faster and with less capital investment. Of course, fast is relative. It’s never going to be instantaneous, but the cloud significantly reduces the time and the cost of building and implementing what were, historically, extremely complex, extremely challenging solutions, getting that first iteration into the hands of your customers or employees more quickly. Typically, this kind of heavy lifting was done only by senior developers at a high cost. Now, junior developers can use these services and integrate them in a scalable way without yet having a full grasp of all aspects of the underlying set-up and management. This cost reduction will make enterprises willing to try more solutions more often, will give senior developers more freedom to explore and innovate, and will give junior developers more in-depth experience sooner.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
As with any major shift in technology, there are bound • • • • to be some associated fears. For companies that aren’t building new solutions but are moving their solutions • • burden • at first. • over, it may feel like an additional cost Compared to the cost of traditional infrastructure, the cloud is more expensive upfront. However, if you • • • • account for management costs and hiring DBAs to maintain the infrastructure, the cloud becomes far more affordable, especially for larger organizations. Security is also a concern for many of our clients, as is the fear of giving up some measure of control and stepping away from how it’s always been done. At Kopis, we think it’s thrilling to sit here at this moment when the paradigm is shifting, and it gives us this strange double perspective. We’re looking forward and back, running through the variables for our clients, helping them make the decision. However, this is how the development world has always been—I’ve seen so many changes in how development gets done in my lifetime, from the traditional client server to traditional web development to modern web development to mobile development just in the past 20 or 25 years. Cloud-based services are just the next version of how software is developed and delivered. As more and more of these services become available, and as we get more options for integration and ways to take advantage of these solutions, cloud services will grow into the standard for many parts of a company’s application portfolio. That doesn’t mean that everything will go there for every company. We believe in the crawl, walk, run model of integrating new technologies into your existing system where it makes best business sense. There are lots of opportunities to get started making the shift, creating new, targeted solutions for customers, building on this new model, phasing out the old and easing into the new with minimal risk, and there is a balance and practicality to approaching these opportunities.
We’re excited and honored to be here for our clients during this moment and to help them navigate this change.
5
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cloud-based services are just the next version of how software is developed and delivered. — AN D R E W KU RT Z President & CEO, Kopis T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
6
machin Your First Machine Learning Project BY JON AT H AN F OWLER
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
7
/
T H E
K O P I S
Don’t invest in an enterprise-grade machine learning solution without knowing ahead of time what you expect to feed into it and get out of it. — J O N AT H AN FO WL E R
•
• E D G E
•
•
•
•
Machine Learning has eclipsed Big Data as the hot buzzword in Business Intelligence as of late. There are a number of tools available now that make it easier than ever to train, test, and deploy machine learning models for business tasks. These platforms offer an exciting step forward for businesses not yet at the machine learning level of BI maturity. My own experience both teaching analytics and working with companies at varying levels of BI maturity requires me to offer a word of caution here: don’t fall into the trap of believing a technology package will be a silver bullet. These tools are amazing, to be sure, but they won’t work for you unless you’ve defined their purpose first. Don’t invest in an enterprisegrade machine learning solution without knowing ahead of time what you expect to feed into it and get out of it.
M A C H I N E
ine learning 1. PREDICTING CRITICAL SYSTEM ERRORS
At Kopis, we have amassed a lot of data with our proprietary systems monitoring platform, Vigilix. The Vigilix agent running on client machines logs critical system events and errors, and over time that equals a lot of data points generated. What good are these terabytes worth of data? By applying machine learning algorithms to the available data, we are able to model what particular system configurations or string of events may precipitate a critical system error. That model can be applied to future events and generate predictive alerts for critical errors before they happen. More data means better training and testing data for model optimization.
2. RETAINING YOUR EMPLOYEES
Imagine this: a multinational manufacturing firm• with thousands • • of • employees worldwide faces an unusually high employee attrition rate every year, but their HR department can’t • • make • • sense of it. They have terabytes of data from different internal systems at their disposal...wouldn’t it• be great • if they • could• leverage all that internal data to figure out what factors run common among those employees who have• left the I • • company? • was part of a team earlier in my career that did just that. The end result was a regular weekly report that listed the• employees • • • most likely to leave the company in the next six months based on the models we • tested. • • • developed, trained, and
L E A R N I N G
Ultimately, the role of machine learning in your organization depends on your business goals and company strategy. It’s not something you do just because other companies are doing it. Of course, with any BI initiative, there are plenty of "unknown unknowns" that are uncovered as projects progress—but you should have clear initial goals for what you want machine learning to improve in your business.
If you’re wondering exactly what you should expect to get out of it, think of two practical examples.
So, where to start? There are two recommended routes here: Amazon AWS & Microsoft Azure. While we won’t examine setup for these platforms until our next issue, it’s important to know there are multiple options in both these cases, and which one you go with largely depends on what you already have in place in your enterprise environment. Azure is more familiar to those invested already in the MS BI stack and MS SQL Server, while AWS tends to be more friendly to opensource technology and platform agnostic. • Whichever • • •you choose, • • can•help platform Kopis you navigate the decision and get the most out of your machine learning project.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
8
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
P U B L I C
S E R V A N T S
The Smart Government Practice
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
BY DAVID FRIEDLINE
Job satisfaction comes in a large part from the sense of having accomplishment. That your work brings value. Not value only in monetary terms, but in impacting others’ lives. This is often the driving force in those that choose the public sector for their career. We hear the term public servant used quite liberally these days, but, in fact, that is what draws many government workers to their chosen profession.
Turn the page to FIND OUT HOW KOPIS IS MAKING AN IMPACT IN THE COMMUNITY.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
10
The Smart Government Practice There is a group of dedicated professionals in the Upstate that have made impacting the lives of South Carolinians their chosen profession for the last two decades. This group has recently joined the Kopis family and brings decades of experience in public sector programs, processes and improvements with them. This group is the Smart Government Practice of NWN Corporation. The Smart Government Practice has gone through several iterations; from CMSI to Integrys Solutions to TiBA Solutions. All along the journey their primary focus has been on automation, improvement, simplification and modernization of systems throughout SC State Government. They have provided services to over four dozen State Agencies. This means that if you have registered to vote or participated in the voting process, started a business or filed for unemployment, attended a two or four-year college or interacted with the DMV online, received a speeding ticket or served probation, this group has developed systems that touched your story. Impacting the lives of all the nearly 5 million South Carolinians gives this group a great sense of accomplishment. And now joining the Kopis family opens the door to impacting more people through our manufacturing and commercial sector clientele.
11
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
S E R V A N T S
•
Some say the Smart Government name is an oxymoron, along the same lines as military • intelligence. • • We are • • to tell • you• nothing • is • here farther from the truth. Our clients across the state are hardworking dedicated subject matter experts that consider all scenarios of policy, legislation, program impact and feasibility on a daily basis. It has been and continues to be our honor to work side by side with them to help make government more efficient in South Carolina and to continue to have positive impacts on our neighbors, friends and colleagues, the citizens of South Carolina.
•
P U B L I C
•
•
There is no more fulfilling sense of accomplishment than positive impacts on all members of our home state. The Kopis leadership team stresses a culture defined with four key words: LEAD, IMPACT, SIMPLIFY, and RESPECT. These words sum up the culture that the Smart Government practice has embodied for years. Within our client base we have strived to provide thought leadership, create meaningful impacts, simplify the complexities of technologies and to do all this with humility and respect. We are extremely happy to be part of the Kopis family and cannot wait to see what the future has in store.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
12
B R E A K T H R O U G H
Trends •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
exciting trends in
cloud dev •
•
•
•
•
•
One of the more exciting and rewarding aspects of working as a developer is getting to see emerging trends in technology firsthand—and getting to have a say in those trends as we help our clients build the right solution.
Y
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
There are two trends that I’ve noticed while working on my most recent project, both supported by common development tools such as Azure and AWS. However, there’s not much awareness about either trend, yet.
01
» Infrastructure-As-Code The first trend is called infrastructure-as-code. In the traditional development cycle, there is the software side and the infrastructure side: all of the behindthe-scenes servers, networks, and databases that enable the software to run correctly and efficiently. The traditional model keeps development and operations siloed. The developers create the software and deploy it, the operations side provisions servers and keeps the system running. The newer DevOps model merges the two by bringing development processes and practices to the operations side. Infrastructure-as-code is one of the tools that’s becoming increasingly popular in DevOps. Instead of operations monitoring and provisioning new servers as needed, logging the activity, and naming new resources as they’re added, the developers can streamline the process by designing what’s needed and defining rules in code. While infrastructure-as-code requires a larger time investment upfront, it saves a lot of time and frustration on the backend. Not only does this practice minimize roadblocks during deployment, but it also simplifies the operations side and formalizes the process. With infrastructure-
as-code, enterprises can automate much of the operations process on the front end, using versioning to see all changes that have been made and who made the changes. For example, the developer can create code that triggers the operations side to provision a new server when a certain utilization is met, logs the activity automatically, and names the new resource automatically, ensuring that strict naming conventions are followed. This system setup reduces the potential for human error, keeps the chain of command clear, and is selfdocumenting, creating much greater transparency and visibility for operations. With large enterprises that manage hundreds of servers, this practice is especially useful as it makes it easier to locate a specific resource and leaves fewer loose ends dangling for your operations team to have to dig through later. Azure supports infrastructure-as-code with its Resource Manager tool, and AWS supports it with CloudFormation. As I’ve been building solutions for our clients, I’ve found lot of hidden gems in these tools that are game-changing for enterprises, and I’ve been surprised that these widely supported, pervasive tools are so underutilized.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
14
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
02
» Writing Serverless Code. The second DevOps trend is writing serverless code, which is a bit of a misnomer. Servers still exist, but we just don't manage or interact with them. Let me explain: In the traditional server-based model, developers have to not only write the functional code but also build up all of this plumbing around it. When a developer gets a request to write a webpage that will automatically resize images for desktop, tablet, and mobile applications, for instance, or that will automatically extract data from an online form and filter, sort, and load that transformed data into another data store, that developer has to go through hundreds of potential backend applications, find the correct one for the project, link it to the project, and make it write somewhere that the enterprise can access it and read it. Writing all of this backend is a lot of work if you’re doing it yourself: figuring out the tech, provisioning it, and then writing code to read from it before you can even begin to develop the actual application. The serverless model, on the other hand, enables developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. The benefit for developers is that it reduces their mental load—by not relying on them to write all of the backend code, enterprises can free their developers up to innovate. The potential benefits for enterprises include simplicity, the ability to scale up or down on demand, and cost savings, since
15
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
clients pay only when a user hits the site and actually runs the code. One of the most exciting benefits to me is the continuous scaling. How to scale, how big to build, is usually the most challenging and frustrating consideration, particularly for enterprises developing user-facing applications. The serverless model automatically scales the application by running code only when triggered, which scales the service precisely to the workload. Azure’s serverless offering is called Azure Functions while the AWS serverless offering is called Lambda. Since both Azure and AWS have hundreds of thousands of clients, they are able to spread the infrastructure load among their clients, maintain data centers, and fill in the gaps. In effect, these services are selling their excess capacity, as a way of using a resource fully and developing a system that is self-adjusting, naturally balancing out over time. Azure and AWS handle provisioning and adding new servers as necessary, and businesses can focus exclusively on user experience or the effectiveness of their application. Using the serverless model has potential downsides and can be a complicated decision. If your dedicated server is close to 100% utilization, or if your work model or architecture doesn’t fit the silos in place, then serverless doesn’t make as much sense because you’ll end up paying more for use or writing more code to make your architecture fit.
I like to use a car analogy to help clients understand what their needs are and which model will work best for them: Owning a Car:
Owning your own servers & data center. You pay a larger, one-time cost to acquire the resource, but you also get complete control and complete freedom over how it’s used. However, it will likely spend most of its time underutilized, sitting in your driveway, and, unless you’re a skilled mechanic yourself, you’ll need to pay someone to maintain it and keep it running for you, adding to the cost over time.
Leasing a Car:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service on Azure or AWS. You pay a fixed monthly cost for the use of the resource, and since it’s under warranty, the cost to keep it running is included in that fee. However, since someone else technically owns the resource, you don’t have total freedom and control to do whatever you want. Your total cost will depend on how long and how often you use the resource.
Uber or Lyft:
Serverless Model, Azure Functions or AWS Lambda (Faas). The resource is completely on-demand, and you pay only for the time that it’s actually in use. However, you lose control over how the resource is used and what you can do. For example, you can call it up to go from Point A to Point B, but you can’t stop for groceries on the way. This model is better for event-based, less circuitous applications that don’t take too long. You wouldn’t want to take a road trip in an Uber or use Uber 10 times a day, or you’ll end up paying more than if you owned your own car.
Both of these complementary trends affect enterprise infrastructure, both can reduce the cognitive burden on your developers and your operations, both have a lot of potential upside for organizations, including the ability to scale more readily and save on your operations and IT budget. Both are also widely available and deeply supported, so I’m interested to see how the DevOps landscape changes as infrastructure-as-code and serverless models become more commonplace.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
16
Re-person •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
& RAP Index
17
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
& R A P I N D E X
ex
Q&A with Chip Felkel, Creator of the RAP Index
R E - P E R S O N A L I Z A T I O N
nalization BY ADAM DR EWES
In our ongoing series about repersonalization, we’re turning the spotlight on organizations that are developing new technology, or using existing technology in new ways, in order to make human interactions more personal instead of the trending de-personalization. We can’t think of many companies who are more deeply invested in repersonalization, or doing a better job at making human interaction more personal and effective, than our long-time client, the RAP Index. The RAP Index is a key contacts software service, developed by advocacy experts for advocacy professionals, that uses a patentpending scoring process to decisively identify and measure the relationships, advocability and political capital of an organization's stakeholders. In other words, the software helps large organizations, such as businesses and universities, make good on the RAP Index tagline: Know who you know.
According to Chip Felkel, the creator of the RAP Index, organizations need to know what their network actually is, not what they think it is, in order to fully understand what relationships they have at their disposal. Personal relationships within the organization lead to messages that are more authentic and alive—and, therefore, more effective. Often even more effective than other forms of advocacy, including online petitions and contract lobbyists.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
18
Re-person The RAP Index relies on a perfect blend of technology and human engagement to create a powerful tool for leveraging the pre-existing relationships within your organization. We sat down with Chip Felkel to find out more:
& RAP Index KE: The RAP Index is a proprietary software with the stated goal of ‘moving’ people. What does that mean to you? What does it look like?
CF: Quite simply, moving people means getting them to act. The RAP Index fights against click-and-send slactivism. A ‘like’ isn’t activism. Neither is sharing or signing an online petition or sending a form email. Not really. In our space, there’s a tremendous amount of depersonalization—and there has been for a long time. It’s far too easy for corporations to use technology and call it advocacy.
Instead, the RAP Index uses technology matched with common sense...the human component. Our technology makes it easier for people to build on the personal relationships that already exist. The index survey is all about identification and assessment of personal connections and longstanding personal relationships between constituents, advocates, and elected officials in order to leverage those connections. Organizations go through cycles of being in love with tech to being disillusioned. Getting everyone who works for you to click-and-send a highly impersonal letter—somehow that’s viewed as effective advocacy. And quantity and volume is effective up to a point. It gives a sense of volume around an issue, but it doesn’t create a conversation or dialogue about complicated issues or enable for the human element. KE: How do corporations usually respond to the idea behind the RAP Index? Is it difficult to get CEOs to see the value? CF: Once they understand what we can do, if we get the chance to demonstrate the power of the human connections within their organization, they usually fall in love. Since we encourage corporations to cast a wide net, many times we’re identifying relationships that they had no idea existed. We’re in an environment that is severely lacking authentic messaging and authentic voices. Finding
19
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
people who have legitimate relationships and motivating them to take action is much more effective and authentic than sharing a form letter. Often, it’s even more effective than paid lobbyists, who do have their place. It’s like the difference between paid reach and organic reach. We’re extending our clients’ organic reach.
Authentic advocacy requires a relationship—and knowing that a legitimate relationship exists is the first step. Relational advocacy is exponentially more effective than click-and-send slactivism, and the opportunity is greater. We use big data to make these small connections. KE: Interacting via software is generally not very personal. How is RAP actually countering that trend, improving human to human interaction, and creating more authentic advocacy?
CF: Our software assesses both the breadth and the depth of the relationships within the organization through an online survey delivered to the stakeholder universe. This survey always comes from someone in the organization they are likely to respond to and has highly personalized messaging. The information we gather is all self-reported or volunteered. How would you describe the relationship? When was your last contact? Being able to say: "This elected official is my dad’s cousin and he comes by the house a couple times a week" is a lot different than saying: "This elected official goes to my 3,000-member church. I think." We also evaluate the advocacy mindset of the stakeholders responding to the survey. Would you be willing to call this person? Write an email? Take him or her to lunch? We not only find out what relationships exist, but how willing members of the organization are to leverage those relationships. We then aggregate the information, weigh the value of the relationship and the potential for effectiveness, hedge the information, score it, and report on it.
nalization
ex •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Our technology makes it easier for people to build on the personal relationships that already exist. ”
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
— CH IP FE LK E L, RAP Index Creator •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
T H E
•
K O P I S
•
E D G E
/
20
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Our relationships with others remain very powerful, perhaps the most powerful thing, despite the impact of technology on our lives.” — CH IP FE LK E L, RAP Index Creator
Re-person
& RAP Index •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
21
/
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
CF: My background is in strategic communications. It’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years, so the RAP Index was a natural fit for me. Every message we deliver is tailored to the organization and always nuanced. We may have a reference to an upcoming congressional fight or a recent fight, for example.
CF: That they remain very powerful, perhaps the most powerful thing, despite the important and sometimes overwhelming impact of technology on our lives. Relationships still matter a whole lot, and we’d be remiss to forget that. I’ve personally seen instance after instance where relationships played a major role in achieving the outcome we wanted.
I N D E X
The beauty of this system is that it weeds out people who aren’t going to take action automatically. An organization can learn a lot about the advocacy mindset of their people based on who responds. If we message in the right way, then the right people will respond—their best messengers will respond—and the filtering process begins immediately.
KE: What are some interesting or surprising things that you have learned about our relationships with others?
R A P
Many of our clients worry about whether or not people within their organization will respond or not, but I always tell them not to. The fact is a lot of people don’t personally know their elected officials, and those who do aren’t always willing to use those relationships. We send an engaging, personal prompt explaining the potential impact of the upcoming legislation. If that doesn’t spark a willingness to respond...you kind of have your answer.
Essentially, our system takes historical data that may have at one time existed in an Excel spreadsheet or in someone’s head who may or may not still be in the organization and makes it quantifiable and actionable. There has never before been a way to go out, capture this data, grow it organically, and then leverage it. By its very nature, relational data is hard to get your arms around and maintain, so I see the RAP Index as the perfect use of technology. We’ve created a platform for this type of data, and anything we can do to make that platform easier and more intuitive will drive engagement.
&
The survey always comes from someone they know, and we let them know a couple of days in advance that it will be coming. The survey is completely branded from their organization and highly interactive, prompting respondents through questions almost like a set-up engine. Respondents are naturally engaged because we’re dealing with issues that affect their industry— potentially impacting their livelihood. That gets a lot of people to respond and act, as you might imagine.
R E - P E R S O N A L I Z A T I O N
KE: In what ways must you take care to bring an engaging experience to those who use the software to encourage advocacy?
Intuitively, we know this, but we often have difficulty leveraging relationships on a larger scale. In day to day life—who hasn’t leveraged a relationship? What we’re doing is taking technology and making it easier to do what we think is beneficial not only for organizations but for the whole policy debate. A lot of the relationships we identify have nothing to do with policy. They’re personal. Ongoing personal interaction is powerful, making the message that much more meaningful and effective. A lot of people spend hours and hours trying to find the right people to deliver an effective message. Part of what we do is we cut down on the time it takes to find the right people who have the relationship and are willing to act.
nalization KE: What technology trends have the biggest possibility to enhance RAP's goal of moving people?
CF: I think quality dashboarding and data visualizations have the most potential. We’ve recently released a new dashboard feature that enables clients to go into the software and instantly see how many relationships they have, who those relationships are with, and what the RAP score is for any member of their organization. It’s all sortable depending on what data they need, putting their best advocates at their fingertips.
ex
The dashboard also includes an interactive map showing where the organization is weak and where it’s strong, giving an easily digestible snapshot of their sphere of influence and immediate feedback about where they need to focus their efforts and develop new inroads.
KE: What’s next for The Felkel Group and The RAP Index?
CF: We’ve been in the public policy space for a long time, and now we’re looking at the possibility of taking our platform and applying it to a business development angle. Instead of matching relationships with elected officials, we’d match relationships with other decision-makers for business development. We’re looking at a couple packages we can offer for smaller organizations that could use our tools and data—looking at ways to make our software affordable for smaller groups that don’t have the budget of a large, multinational corporation.
T H E
K O P I S
E D G E
/
22
411 University Ridge, Suite 230 • Greenville, SC 29601 kopisusa.com
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
04 • •
•
•