Platform Management
We are all technology companies now, whether we embrace it or not.
Too often technology decisions are made to address a single issue or departmental need within companies, and these choices rarely align. This is especially true in the communications and outreach space, where those handling donations or sales aren’t the same people handling audience acquisition or customer service.
Investing in technology has significant costs in departmental budgets and staff time, not to mention the potential disruptions system changes can have on interacting with your audiences. Technology choices, lifecycle planning, tool and system implementation, training, data integration, and interoperability need to be managed holistically as a portfolio. Most organizations don’t have a CTO focused on their organization’s outreach platform, which can make it difficult for technology systems to be aligned and integrated across departments, and across audiences.
ParsonsTKO believes in right-fit solutions that focus on the existing investments, staff expertise, and cumulative planning to iteratively evolve your engagement platform into a highly effective future state. Technology is a tool and should enhance your work, not add to your burdens. We help your organization make investments in technology and custom software development that are guided by a holistic plan that ensures every dollar spent advances your organizational goals, rather than just creating temporary showpieces.
Our Technology & Automation Services
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Technical Architecture
Wonderful user experiences with technology rarely occur by accident, and just as rarely do technologies age like fine wine. Most organizations don’t have the luxury to solve both their acute current needs as well as to consider how their organization’s mid-term plans will intersect with the likely trajectory of technical innovation or future technologies.
We architect all of our solutions to provide value to your organization as quickly as possible, while at the same time allowing for iterative improvement based on real-world feedback. It’s been our experience that most organizations learn what their real requirements and needs are through the use of the technologies they have, and that the best technical designs take this into account.
Technical architecture that stands the test of time is flexible, modular, adaptable, and designed to allow iterative improvements. We incorporate community standards for structuring data, integrating systems, and delivering content wherever possible to maximize the interoperability of out of the box systems, and focus on the use of open source solutions when designing custom software to ensure that solutions can be evolved or adapted in the future.
Tool Evaluation and Selection
You have a clear need, and you may have identified a few solutions that could work, all the while every salesperson you talk with is confident that their particular solution is your best option. Your colleagues from other teams and departments want to have input and make sure you are not missing any single possible opportunity. A VP in another department wants you to justify using a different system than they are using. Does any of this sound familiar? You are not alone: navigating the wide variety of technology choices seems to always intersect with the internal politics of an organization.
Our team is software agnostic (although we prefer open source solutions if custom development will be required) and we can save time and sanity by helping you discover, evaluate, and “right fit” tools. Our evaluation processes take into account not just your existing systems, staff capacity, and budget, but also the internal pressures that can block consensus or adoption of particular tool choices.