VIGILIX: A CASE STUDY HOW TO MEASURE THE SUCCESS OF A BI SOLUTION
THE RAP INDEX: A CASE STUDY
LIFE AFTER GO-LIVE
ISSUE FOCUS
MODEL THE BUSINESS FOR BE T TER PERFORMANCE
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From the CEO's Desk A N D R E W K U R TZ
Vigilix: A Case Study How to Measure the Success of a BI Solution K E V I N W E N TZ E L
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Ellipsis: A Case Study
Model Business for Better Performance TY LER FO U LD S
The RAP Index: A Case Study
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CEO’s Desk
Planning for Life After Go-Live BY ANDREW KURTZ
Life after go-live, or after launch, is a phenomenon that I’ve experienced from both sides.
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I have experience on the Kopis side, using my knowledge to help clients adequately prepare for go-live, but I have also experienced go-live as the actual client and owner of the solution—which I think makes me more empathetic to what our clients feel and experience. While the details of these two experiences are decidedly different, the lessons that I’ve learned from them are incredibly similar. Overall, the main lesson I’ve taken away from 25 years of experience with many kinds of companies in many different industries is that go-live is just the beginning. The project doesn’t end when you launch, ever, and your product isn’t ready until it’s ready.
ANDREW KURTZ • • PRESIDENT &•CEO andrew.kurtz@kopisusa.com
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• beginning • • There are three main reasons why go-live marks the true of your project:
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It’s impossible to nail a bullseye right out of the gate.
Even when you do nail it, the bullseye will move.
After go-live, opportunities for solving additional • • • • problems will arise.
Whether you’re building an internal-facing or a customerfacing solution, when you go live, your product is making first contact with the real world. Everything up to this point was merely theoretical, operating in a test environment, which can only simulate real life. That means that what you learn after launch, and one of the biggest pressures you feel prior to go-live, is that the real world isn’t always perfectly aligned with what you thought the problem was in the first place. Consider aiming for a plan that delivers a solution whose readiness survives first contact with customers, because I promise, no matter how much market research or customer engagement you conduct, you won’t hit the predetermined bullseye. It doesn’t matter if you’re bringing a new product to market or building something for internal use, you’re going to design around one set of assumptions and then discover new ones that help you refine and get even better. Real contact with real users changes your knowledge.
The second major pressure for a product after go-live is the fact that the environment itself is not static, which is true whether you’re building a solution or buying a solution from someone else. The type of problem, the issues that you’re trying to solve, and the environment will all shift and adjust over time, and often very quickly. This is something I’ve seen over and over again as I’ve helped customers through go-live. You’ve designed a product to solve a specific issue, and it does, but then the issue shifts over time. While this can understandably feel frustrating, it is a natural part of the software development cycle and should be expected (and planned for) from the beginning of the project—because every environment is dynamic.
Finally, it may be that you do nail the bullseye, or come close enough, and the problem doesn’t change in a significant way—but solving the original problem reveals another, adjacent problem. After go-live, you find that you need to explore additional capabilities to solve the new problems that have been revealed. Again, this is a common, expected issue after go-live. With any new product build, you are typically trying to solve the most pressing, impactful problem at that moment. But when you solve that one, there’s now a new biggest problem. Your top 10 problems get replaced with a new top 10. Of course, there comes a point of diminishing returns with problemsolving. You can continue to solve, and solve, and solve forever, but what’s the ROI? Just as you need to plan to solve additional issues after go-live, you also need to establish a cap and put a decision-making process into place to determine when you will be done so you’re not chasing every shiny new issue.
Given these three realities of life after go-live, my biggest advice to clients is to plan accordingly. In other words, don’t factor only the investment it will take to go-live, factor in the costs post go-live as well. You can’t properly make an ROI determination on new software without accounting for the additional efforts required after go-live. While this applies to both building software and buying off-the-shelf and configuring for your needs, it’s especially true for custom-built software.
Remember that software always exists in a living, breathing environment and will not remain static. Planning for anything less will result in an unfinished product and an unhappy team or unsatisfied customers.
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Consider aiming for a plan that delivers a solution whose readiness survives first contact with customers. — AN D R E W KU RT Z President & CEO, Kopis
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Vigilix
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One of the main benefits of creating client-facing software solutions is that you have the ability to grow and add capabilities as your customer base grows.
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In other words, while you will have additional costs to consider after go-live, just as you would with an internalfacing solution, some of those costs can, and should, be offset by your sales efforts or valuation increases.
ve Overplan, Don't Overbuild The main thing to keep in mind when planning for go-live with a client-facing solution is to account for ongoing development and life after launch. Typically, most product developers have to do some pretty heavy lifting in order to get market adoption, so the last thing you want to do is spend tons of money on architecture or features that won’t be needed for years. For instance, if you build too big, if you spend resource time or money to build too much scalability into your product before go-live, then you’ve wasted money when it is your most critical constraint.
Remember that the market will tell you what you’ve missed and, while you’ll have to build some scalability into your initial release, you don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself—or too far ahead of your customers. Every time you begin a new development effort, you are at the point of maximum ignorance. Get to your Minimum Viable Product, release, get validation and metrics, and repeat.
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What We Learned By Launching Vigilix The Kopis team has in-depth knowledge about how to plan for scalability with a consumerfacing solution from our experience from launches and continued development with companies like Vigilix. When we first built what became Vigilix—before it was spun off into its own company—it wasn’t targeted to the Point-of-Sale market; it was originally built to help IT departments manage their own systems—so a big company was a user that, perhaps, had 100 servers they were monitoring, or maybe 1000 desktops. To us, that was huge. It wasn’t until after go-live, when we’d gone to market with the solution and been out there for a while, that we moved into the much larger POS space. Even there, at first, we were developing and maintaining our solution in a world where one customer might have 5,000 agents. Soon, we moved up a level, and we had about six customers with 5,000 agents a piece and one customer with 10,000 agents. At that point, we had to adjust the scale, and we had to invest in more robust support. However, that would not have been a wise investment to make prior to go-live, back when our solution was handling between 100 and 1000 systems. Rather, we needed the features that were required to attract those first 20-30 thousand agents. This frugality with regard to topics like scale allowed us to spend most of our time iterating on product features
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This is a tricky nuance—a subtle balance that’s difficult to maintain and is different for every new product. For us, as we matured, decisions couldn’t be made in the vacuum of new customer acquisition as we had amassed a healthy population of existing customers. But for others with existing customer bases, the balance can be especially hard to strike before go-live, when you haven’t tested in a real-world environment yet, but it’s something that product developers need to account for—both during the original development cycle and after launch— during ongoing development.
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While we discovered new issues that we needed to resolve and dealt with assumptions that morphed after go-live, planning for the correct volume, avoiding the temptation to overbuild, was an important aspect of the Vigilix launch that we handled particularly well. The danger of overbuilding prior to the initial launch, whether it is product features or concerns like scaling, is that you run out of development resources before you’ve grown a sufficient user base to sustain your own growth.
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towards our quest for product-market fit. Those decisions weren’t and still aren’t easy. There are always benefits and consequences, risk and reward. But certainly one of our greatest strengths was rapidly iterating and releasing new features to attract new customers.
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There are always benefits and consequences, risk and reward. But certainly one of our greatest strengths was rapidly iterating and releasing new features to attract new customers.
If you are considering launching a product, whether you are a startup or enterprise, think through how much you really need at go-live to provide value to your early adopters. By allocating funds for the period of time after initial release, you have the option to continue with your originally planned features or to pivot to meet the largest market need.
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How to Measure the Success of a BI Solution BY K EV IN WENT Z EL
Building and implementing a business intelligence platform isn't a small investment. It requires resources — both time and money. Beyond the initial cost to build the software, there are also costs to deploy, training costs, and maintenance costs. BI software can have a big payoff, delivering signicicant ROI. But in order to see the benefits, an organization will need to know how to measure success and put a plan in place to meet those benchmarks. The gauges of success fall into two main categories: business outcomes and operational indicators. Let’s look at each.
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Business Outcome Gauges of Success
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Leadership teams are concerned with driving profit. And BI platforms can certainly deliver, if implemented properly. If your platform is achieving the following results, you’ll be on track to see the outcomes you need.
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1. DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS Anyone involved in decision-making should be able to quickly and easily pull up a dashboard to see at a glance what’s going on with any given process, system, or metric.
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2. PACE OF SOLUTION DELIVERY Without a platform, an organization spends ongoing operational time to create reports for decision-makers and team members alike. This takes time from IT, subject matter experts, and leadership, and it can interfere with other operational tasks. A robust BI solution reduces ongoing operational time to create reports as they are defined and available at any time. Time to create new reports and dashboards also decreases as new data sources are integrated into the model. Companies reaching self-service offload further work from IT to subject matter experts shortening the recognition lag of new opportunities dramatically.
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3. DECREASED TIME TO RECOGNITION & RESPONSE When something goes wrong, you need to know that it is happening and why it is happening. A BI solution shortens the recognition window because the right data is already in front of your organization, rather than them producing it manually. This capability is one of the greatest benefits of a BI solution, as it drastically reduces the time it takes to get essential information. 4. VALUE FOR ALL CORE AREAS OF THE BUSINESS A common mistake when implementing a BI solution is a narrow vision for the use of the platform. While a solution should generally be rolled out to the departments incrementally, moving up the maturity model means deploying solutions on the platform across the organization, so it can return value to all core areas of the business. Without cross functionality, you’ll have incomplete information and won’t be able to accurately uncover opportunities and inefficiencies. Databases should be checked to determine which method of torn-page detection they use. Databases brought over from older versions of SQL Server often have the former method configured, rather than the latter.
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Operational Gauges of Success In order to see these business outcomes, you’ll need to ensure that certain operational benchmarks are met. Here’s what you should consider. 1. RELIABILITY If a BI solution is going to deliver outcomes, it has to be both reliable and accessible. Data processes should return data in a timely manner. No process should be breaking down regularly. End users should be able to get information quickly. A well-built, robust platform can easily handle these requirements. 2. ENGAGEMENT Team members should be using the platform, asking questions, and requesting changes. A high level of activity means that the platform is not only being used, but also improved to better match the needs of the team.
End users should be able to get information quickly.
3. EXTENSIBILITY If the BI platform has a strong foundation, it should be able to be extended quickly. When team members request additional capabilities, it shouldn’t take a long time to get changes made to the platform.
—K EVIN WENT ZEL
4. A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP Ideally, a few people will be so engaged that they become champions of the solution. These individuals are experiencing elimination (or drastic reduction) of various pain points, and the benefits of the solution are clear to them. As a result, they’re encouraging adoption and promoting the solution to the rest of the team. Look for these people in the operational, financial, and sales departments, since you’ll need adoption to cross all areas of the business. When your BI solution is well-designed and wellbuilt, and when team members are actively adopting and engaged with it, you’ll start seeing the business benefits that lead directly to ROI. Focusing on these gauges of success will help you stay on track to reach your goals.
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Ellipsis Technologies develops and maintains a revolutionary, proprietary web security technology that invisibly verifies human site visitors while protecting against harmful bots. A couple of years ago, however, this ground-breaking technology wasn’t available to online merchants and website developers.
The Challenge Bill West, Principal of The Atlantic Partners—also a serial entrepreneur and turnaround specialist during the telecom boom and a partner/investor in multiple technology ventures worldwide—approached the Kopis team with a one-of-a-kind challenge. Bill hadn’t founded Ellipsis Technologies yet, but he had discovered a company in Atlanta with an interesting idea, and the beginnings of an interesting technology. "I thought they had a good technology on their hands, but I wasn’t 100 percent certain," said Bill. "The company’s funding had run out, and they were looking to sell. I wanted to consult with Kopis and get an expert opinion before putting time and money into acquiring the company. Could this be something? Could we take it further?"
The Kopis team was excited by the prospect of getting involved with something this big at the groundlevel and potentially helping to take the product to launch. Kopis came on board the project as corporate technology consultants. "Originally, I hired Kopis to give me their professional opinion, to help me evaluate the product and strategize with me on whether I should acquire the product," said Bill. "Andy (Kurtz, Kopis CEO) joined me in Atlanta for the meeting, and his insights were so transformative, the project grew from there."
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The Solution After the initial evaluation, Kopis determined that the technology had great potential but still needed significant work before it was ready to go to market. Kopis advised Bill West and his team that they would be more successful raising money, and have a more successful launch, if they fine-tuned the technology first. "I bought the technology and hired Kopis to modify it and build on it," Bill said. "We spent a year rebuilding the product, meeting and working together constantly during that time. Everyone knows that CAPTCHA-style verification tests are annoying, and the alternatives that have come out recently are even more annoying. But for online businesses, they’re more than annoying. They’re costly. Potential customers leave your site rather than select every road sign. We set out to change all that, and to change the way users interact with websites." Over the course of the year, a team of Kopis developers created a technology that invisibly detects human presence on the web using machine learning
algorithms to track the timing and movement of data touches and swipes, securely storing this information in the cloud, including a quick and easy installation process. "This was an incredibly complex assignment, though the concept is simple," said Bill. "We wanted a technology that focuses on identifying humans rather than catching bots—that lets people on a website without frisking them. The Kopis team ramped up fast, showed us how machine learning technology can help solve difficult problems, and built something terrific that surpassed our original design. Andy’s consulting gave me the confidence I needed to pursue this path, while Kelly Summerlin and the rest of the developers were total rock stars."
The Results "Kopis was able to help us raise our money and get us to launch with a fantastic enter-the-market product that exceeded all of our expectations," Bill said. "This year, we’re moving onto the next phase, where we plan to focus on upgrading the technology to include safeguards against bypassing web browsers. We are also looking into more lucrative distribution channels—currently, all of our clients are enterprise or e-commerce, but the bigger network is web hosting services." The Kopis team is thrilled that we were brought in for this unique, groundbreaking product launch, and we look forward to continuing our work and seeing where the technology goes next. "Kopis was integral to our success from day one," said Bill. "There’s not a single part of the process that doesn’t have the Kopis stamp on it. They even helped us come up with the name for our company. We had no name in the beginning, but as we communicated back and forth by email, we noticed everyone used the ellipsis. It became a joke between us, and then we realized it’s a distinctly human punctuation. Something a bot would never do. The ellipsis depicts an open-ended conversation, or an ongoing relationship. And that’s what we have with Kopis...an ongoing conversation about how to make the Internet better for humans."
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Ellipsis Technologies was able to raise the money they needed to get to market and has successfully launched with a solid technology. Their product launched as a plugin for WordPress and Shopify, and, so far, is used by 4 million sites worldwide. The Ellipsis team and Kopis are now looking toward the next iteration of their product and their business plan.
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— BILL WES T Principal, The Atlantic Partners
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bett Model the Business for Better Performance BY T YLER F OU LDS
Today’s businesses rely on data for decision-making. They need to know where a process has broken down, where bottlenecks are occurring, or where opportunities lie.
Many systems, both internal and external, produce data to provide us with the insight we need to make those decisions. However, to get this information, data often has to be combined or manipulated and later represented in a manner that clearly communicates that insight.
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While Excel sheets may work for a while, eventually successful business processes grow beyond the capability of a spreadsheet-based reporting system. Having various team members write their own logic and create their own macros becomes cumbersome, especially when different logic is used in different spreadsheets, creating confusion. Having a business intelligence tool that streamlines access to data and report creation can improve business performance — if the BI solution is modelled on the business. Modeling the business is foundational to building a BI solution that delivers ROI. If the solution is designed without a complete picture of how the business operates and what individual users need, it will be only partially successful. Here’s a process you can use to model your business when you start working on a BI project.
End users are typically used to dumping data and then trying to make sense of it, when starting with a proper model would allow them to start at a high level and allow them to drill down into smaller data points. For example, if a user wants to learn how much revenue should be realized for a given month, a series of business rules that take into account data from several systems need to be applied. Those rules might stack differently if the time slice is changed, and you don’t want users to have to rewrite the rules every time they need to look at a different time slice. Users need to be able to look at individual metrics or at a single table to spot trends.
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For example, one company had one report that contained all their data, so they were very careful and spent significant effort to ensure that only the right customer's data was included in customer reports. By involving all the people who were spending time using Excel to extract the right data from that report, the company ended up with reports that were easier to slice and present data to their customers in a more consistent manner without the risk of accidently sending the customer the wrong data.
Next, look at what level of detail users should have access to. Depending on the individual’s role in the company, a given user will need different levels of detail than another user — a financial analyst vs. a C-level executive, for example.
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Finally, look at business drivers to learn how each area of the business and each business process is being measured. This will frame the importance of the data sources and the calculations you will need to create in order to add to the model that fits both the drivers and the vocabulary of your users.
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Also consider data definitions in this step— defining the data in the terms the users are familiar with, rather than those of the systems they use. Keep in mind that different roles may define these terms differently. This is a critical step (and one that doesn’t even involve technology) to getting everyone on the same page when looking at your reporting and dashboards. Behind the scenes, this helps you define the vocabulary of your model.
2. Determine What Levels of Data Are Needed
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First, sit down with the users of the analytics to find out what they currently have as well as what they wish they had. Ask business-related questions, rather than technology questions, to understand from a business perspective what they need in order to do their jobs better. Ask about the problems they’re facing, and learn what they’re trying to accomplish. It’s a good idea to meet with several people from different areas of the company to get everyone’s perspectives and learn everyone’s needs.
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tter 1. Get Insights From the Users
3. Map Out the Model Based on the insight you gathered from the end users and what you’ve learned about the business, map out the simplest and most reusable model that can be built. Consider what might change in the future and make sure that the platform is easy to update as developments occur. Also ensure that all data being pulled is coming into one central place and determine what logic should be built into the platform to create the reports. Modeling the business is absolutely essential for a BI solution that meets the needs of the various users and helps the company reach its goals. Without it, you’re simply hoping that the platform will achieve the objectives and deliver the ROI that you’re looking for.
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The RAP Index
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The Kopis team believes that technology is entering the Age of Re-personalization, so we enjoy working with companies that are at the forefront of this emerging trend. One such company is The RAP Index, founded by Chip Felkel, an entrepreneur and activist with 30 years of experience in strategic communications.
The Challenge "What we’ve created is a powerful tool for advocacy and better networking," said Chip. "Our stated goal is to move people and our tagline is 'Know Who You Know'. The RAP Index helps organizations achieve both of these goals simultaneously by relying on a perfect blend of technology and human engagement to leverage the pre-existing relationships within your organization."
"The RAP Index has always been a useful tool, but we’re also always working to improve it," Chip said. "What we wanted, what we went to Kopis for, was an intuitive dashboard feature that would enable clients to get more immediate feedback."
Over the past few years, Kopis has worked with The RAP Index on a number of projects—from routine system maintenance and support to transitioning the system to a new, more reliable data source. Most recently, Kopis has worked with The RAP Index development team to build a new dashboard feature and launch an international pilot of the system.
"Almost every time we’ve brought Kopis in on a project, we’ve done so in order to make our system more userfriendly and provide our customers with the data and the intuitive features they need to be successful," said Brian. "Kopis is not only great at development, they’re great at strategic thinking and clear communication, which is exactly what we want to deliver to our clients."
Brian Aufmuth, one of the lead project managers for the dashboard feature, agreed.
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With the client’s parameters in mind, Kopis got to work by integrating with The RAP Index team and building the solution. "Kopis always spends time on the front end talking to our developers, getting to know our system, and understanding what we need it to do," Brian said. "They then review our code independently to make sure we haven’t missed anything—which can easily happen on a project of this scale. I appreciate the thorough and professional nature of their work." After our initial conversation, Kopis again met with The RAP Index team to establish a process, discuss the project specs, determine the full scope of the project, and create a reasonable time and cost estimate.
"The way the Kopis team communicates is extraordinary. They clearly establish expectations before starting work and then they deliver," said Brian. "Once the project has begun, they check back in regularly, schedule weekly meetings to review completed work, and discuss timelines and next steps. Kopis is proactive; I never feel like I have to chase them down to get a status update." According to Brian, proactive communication is just one of the reasons that The RAP Index and Kopis partner together so well. "With Kopis, we always know what we’re going to get. We know they have a team with vast knowledge and expertise," Brian said. "We also know that they have an equally comprehensive QA process, which means they can handle the entire development cycle for us, including launch—not just the development piece of it. We have confidence that the project will be delivered exactly as we need it."
The Results The RAP Index launched the new dashboard feature earlier this year, and so far, the results have been overwhelmingly positive. "The dashboard feature is beautiful," said Chip. "It’s a fantastic feature that displays a client’s RAP score, how many relationships they have, and even a geographic map showing where they’re weak and where they’re strong. We wanted to give our clients an automatic snapshot and easily digestible data, and Kopis made that happen for us."
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With Kopis, we always know what we're going to get. We know they have a team with vast knowledge and expertise."
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— B R I AN AU FM U T H Project Manager, The RAP Index
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411 University Ridge, Suite 230 • Greenville, SC 29601 kopisusa.com
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