Staying on top of the latest technology has always been important to us at NSCS. Our key demographic is college students – if we don’t make things easy, cool and integrated with the things they already know and love, they won’t bother coming back to nscs.org. Also, as a people-driven business, our goal is to free our resources up for interacting v. data entry or other administrative work.
To that end, we’ve come to be completely dependent (isn’t everyone?) on technology to run our core business, consistently putting both time and money into defining our online environment, what platform it sits on and well well pieces are integrated within it.These are not easy questions and often once you have an answer it’s already out of date.
At some point in early 2007, we decided that our current AMS was great at the basics but wouldn’t allow us to start using new tools without bulky and resource-eating integrations. We thus began the long process of finding a new system, or a developer to build one for us. We did research, talked to countless firms and eventually signed a contract with a company who seemed to get our vision and had the tools to make it happen. That was spring. By early summer we had a preview planned for our chapter leaders. Nothing was ready. By late summer it was clear that the company could not actually deliver what we scoped. We terminated the project and began our search again.
Fortunately, we could salvage some of the work done, but not all. A new company jumped in on a tight schedule, with the intention of getting us ready to launch by January 2008 at the start of our annual membership campaign. The launch was rocky and with just 48 hours of joins (or lack thereof) under our belt, we had to make the difficult yet easy decision to put our tail between our legs and go back to the AMS we had just left. While we were excited about the potential of a new system, if we didn’t have the ability for new members to join easily, there was no point in having a new site.
We stuck it out for the next few months with that 2nd company – working through scenarios whereby we could keep our database of record as our current AMS yet lay a new site and social networking experience on top of it. This was a point in time where Facebook was gaining momentum but we still had the idea that our members would be excited about an exclusive network tied to their membership. They weren’t, and so we finished out the project as scoped and sought out yet a 3rd company that would focus on integration with Facebook (and other tools) rather than building them from scratch.
That vendor relationship lasted for almost a year and a half – the longest we’d worked with a technology company other than what is now a 12 year stint with our AMS. There were a lot of good things that came out of that work, but the strain on both our time and money resources was just too high for what we were getting. We had data going back and forth between too many places, and our members still weren’t wowed by their experience with us. Even though choosing stability was the right decision in the short term, we still needed to find a way to evolve our online environment without compromising our ability to run our core business.
Thus in the winter/spring of 2010, we began the thought and eventually search process for the next iteration of our online environment. It started with a redesign of our home page and an elimination of all social networking technology that wasn’t Facebook. We evolved from there into embracing Facebook Connect and using Facebook’s core technology for many of our business needs. Finally, in late 2010, we started conversations with Salesforce development companies, convinced that the platform would give us the stable and strong business processes that we needed combined with scalable innovation and integration.
Most importantly, we took time during this evaluation to look internally as well, asking and answering the question of why our past efforts had failed. Was it the companies? Were we trying to do the wrong things? Did we not manage it well? Our ability to answer these questions was a key turning point in the decision to try the redefinition of our online environment again.
In assessing our development strategy, we understood that both trying to build from scratch and trying to integrate new tools with an out-of-date AMS were fruitless efforts. Additionally, in all instances, we tried to re-create our processes verbatim, failing to think differently about how to best reach our outcomes. In assessing our management strategy, we understood that we had managed the project too top-down, failing to get input and then buy-in from the on-the-ground TEAM early and then throughout the project. And again, with process v. outcome, we understood that we falsely set expectations for the TEAM that the new system would replicate every key stroke of their current operations. When it didn’t, neither our employees nor our chapter leadership embraced the new tools, even in places where they worked well.
With respect to the point about development, we chose to go with Salesforce and then a consulting/development company who didn’t just build but helped redefine our process based on core outcomes. With respect to the point about management, I stepped back from the day-to-day of the project, empowering our Director TEAM to interface with the developers, get others involved and define every detail of the system. Also, while Salesforce is the platform, we’ve been deliberate in how we’ve talked about it, embracing the tool as ScholarCentral and thus branding it as ours.
The combination of these efforts has given us buy-in from day 1, and the collaborative nature of the project has fueled the excitement around our launch last week. We’ve also figured out our own best practices around technology development, and will continue to employ them in the future. It’s not to say that the project hasn’t been without challenges, but our approach has made them just things we have to figure out instead of potential show-stoppers. Check out our next post by the day-to-day TEAM for more information on that.
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