It may not conform to the rules of writing, however to not define the term “eating your own dog food” at the beginning of this post may confuse the reader to think that this blog is about the nutritional benefits of our new dog food Yummy Puppy Munch provided by our Canadian subsidiary New Dog Technologies. Therefore, if you believe the self-definition community of Wilkopedia the term “eating your own dog food” is described as;
“Eating your own dog food originated from television commercials for Alpo brand dog food actor Lorne Greene would tout the benefits of the dog food, and then would say it’s so good that he feeds it to his own dogs.”
“In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” challenging him to increase internal usage of the product; from there, the usage of the term spread through Microsoft, as chronicled in the book Inside Out: Microsoft In Our Own Words. The phrase became slang during the dot-com craze of the late ’90s, and is used most commonly in reference to technology companies.”
So how does this apply to New Dawn Technologies? Let’s start at the beginning and hopefully I can keep the history short.
Since the foundation of the company we have internally believed in the principals that we preach to our customers; the legacy of any agency, court, or company resides in the data stored in their case management system or CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Since 1996, commercial CRM software was implemented at New Dawn to track all customer, prospect and partner contact, to detail and document support cases, and served as a repository for all customer and prospect documents and files. This information was the collection point where customer metrics, resource accountability and project tracking was delivered to staff, department managers and to C-level executives.
As we have evolved and migrated from one commercial CRM program (Goldmine) to the next (Sage CRM) we have been conscious to spend sufficient planning time to ensure that this important data asset was migrated to each new system.
In 2006, we were proud (or at least I was, more on that later) of the fact that every department in the company from sales, marketing, development, quality assurance, accounting and services utilized the same CRM for all functions. A customer record provided a global view of contact information and daily transactions from an accounting, support, project management or sales perspective.
The core values of New Dawn Technologies have led our team members to some amazing initiatives. New Dawn’s core value on Individualism encourages employees to passionately share and implement new and innovative ideas, even if those ideas cut against the grain.
This ideal is typically the catalyst for many brilliant and market changing ideas at New Dawn, however free thinking and innovative initiatives that swell from the floor can be divergent from the vision of the executive leaders. However, emotionally intelligent leaders quickly realize the sooner they embrace the passion and innovation of their team members, the quicker that these ideas can actually be the accelerator of their original vision. If you hire smart and autonomous talent, let them be smart and autonomous.
Shortly after the start of 2007 one of New Dawn’s most passionate team members orchestrated a positively motivated coup in the development department. Led by former Microsoft employee Glenn Thimmes, the development and quality assurance department succeeded from the Sage CRM union and began using our very own JustWare (dubbed internally Evolution) for all development and quality assurance case tracking based on the following justifications;
- JustWare exceeded Sage CRM in case and customer relationship tracking.
- Any enhancements that Glenn and his team made would be conducted after hours in order to not delay customer development projects.
- In order to benefit all JustWare customers any enhancements that we needed in Sage CRM would be more logical to be made in JustWare.
- By “eating our own dog food” we would experience all of the benefits and items for improvement in JustWare thus allowing us to increase our overall knowledge of JustWare, provide relevant improvements and ultimately attest these benefits to prospects and customers.
Glenn described the “eating your own dog food” era during his tenure at Microsoft and how it allowed for employees to evangelize the Microsoft products that they create and ultimately use on a daily basis.
Upon further discussion with President and CEO, Thomas P. Higgins, we thought that this friendly coup may be a great opportunity to get more benefits than drawbacks. We decided to encourage the use of JustWare under a few guidelines;
- One code base. New Dawn has an amazing track record of providing a highly focused and personalized per-market case management solution by using one powerful and flexible code base. It is our strength in the market and the techniques and strategy that we manage this single code base is envied by partners and competitors alike. If we were going to take advantage of enhancements that the team made, they had to add value to the entire code base, not split off and become its own code base. One upgrade script had to not only accommodate our entire customer code base; it had to accommodate our internal system. At the core of case management software the features and benefits of any great program are quite similar to a commercial CRM product. Our customers have the same requirements that we have for relationship tracking, document generation, batch printing, calendar and event management, report and metric creation, powerful business rules, statistical dashboards, document scanning and routing and much more. Evolving our use and requirements of our internal JustWare solution would naturally evolve the functionality of JustWare for our customers.
- Hosted in our data center. We allowed JustWare to be used internally only on the condition that it was hosted in our secure, off-site data center in Salt Lake City and used externally over the web. If features and functionality were needed to benefit New Dawn and our customers, everything had to be designed to operate efficiently over the web. We would experience firsthand, a hosted solution.
Under this direction New Dawn followed the path of many of our customers. We conducted several data conversions, per department screens and dashboards were constructed. Usability enhancements were made that benefited all JustWare customers, and those employees who traditionally were removed from JustWare such as accounting and front office staff were able to experience the software program that pays the bills.
A sense of ownership and pride has occurred that allows everyone to rally around the software product that is used by thousands. A peer relationship to our customers has allowed for some amazing improvements, advancements and usability modifications.
Under these conditions Glenn and his team embraced the use of JustWare internally, and has spread the evangelism of JustWare to other departments. Currently all departments are using JustWare for internal functions, with the Sales and Marketing department slated for implementation next year.
Under most conditions I would traditionally counsel against an “eating your own dog food” initiative when implementing software. I typically recommend leaving it up to the professionals and use your development resources to focus on revenue generating tasks, however under the guidelines that have been put into place, we are those professionals, and now can personally attest to the full body taste of JustWare.
– See more at: http://newdawn.com/2009/10/03/this-dog-food-isnt-half-bad/#sthash.0uAyGeXI.dpuf
veryance. 