Norwalk’s Shibumi makes strategic oversight out of tactical task tracking

BY JUSTIN MCGOWN jmcgown@westfairinc.com

Mark DiGirolamo once worked at a major software company but grew frustrated when his projects were repeatedly canceled.

“We were involved in a lot of big strategic programs around transforming big software companies,” DiGirolamo recalled. “Oftentimes in that process it would get canceled before we actually finished and we couldn’t reach the completion of the stated goals of the program, and we realized that was a common problem.”

According to DiGirolamo, the company — which he declined to name — wound up costing itself money as a result of these cancelations.

“Executives that were investing in these programs weren’t seeing the benefits, they were just seeing the costs,” DiGirolamo said. “We were actually delivering benefits, but there just wasn’t a good way to make sure that the executives and the stakeholders knew it, they didn’t have visibility into it. So that was the idea: how could we help companies better communicate all of the great stuff that a program is achieving back to the people sponsoring it?”

The answer was to turn entrepreneur and develop Shibumi, an app that allows executives to track the many moving parts of their companies and better understand how individual projects and teams are progressing not only toward their own goals, but how they are helping other units achieve theirs.

The name “Shibumi” was sourced from the title of a novel by Trevanian and is a Japanese term, which refers to how simplicity and complexity can co-exist in an object or design resulting in a process of continual improvement and change. DiGirolamo, who holds the title of chief customer officer for this Norwalk-based company, launched Shibumi in 2011 in partnership with two for-