When you amortize development costs of solutions that are adaptable to diverse requirements across many customers, everyone benefits. Customers get vastly better value for their dollar, reduced risk, and benefit from ongoing co-investment and product evolution over time. As a company, a software model simultaneously provides the opportunity to earn compelling profits that will delight our shareholders and secure the livelihoods of our employees on a long-term basis.

Someone can build (or buy) a Boeing 787, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got themselves an airline. Creating a true software company is about building an organization that ensures our products generate enduring value for customers, and that we design and execute well on the ancillary services (updates/R&D, QA/QC, support, training, partnerships, professional services, bi-directional communication, and ongoing development of our staff) that are required to ensure they succeed with our technology.

We understand that our job is a process and not an event; it’s all about enduring success with deployments. Everyone loves basking in the appreciation that flows from a successful roll-out, but the true value of a great enterprise implementation and vendor relationship is revealed over years (and sometimes decades). No system is an island, and successful products evolve alongside external technology forces, where both incremental and disruptive external technology changes over time consistently create opportunities to enrich customer deployments, rather than embodying major obstacles that interrupt productivity with rewrites and redeployments.

Virtually all worthwhile new technologies capitalize on eliminating old inefficiencies, rather than capitalizing on the inefficiencies themselves. Based heavily on Michael Hammer’s timeless concepts in Re-engineering the Corporation, we strive to rethink fundamental processes to create better, more efficient ways of doing things. We counsel not to get hung up on old workflows; it’s about outcomes. We also strive to ruthlessly cannibalize configuration and management activities in our software that might’ve traditionally represented billable project hours.

Our responsibility is to focus on the right things. Our job is to meet current requirements and wants of customers and their end users, but also invest in R&D to ensure ongoing relevance in the face of inevitable technology change. We seek to do product development that will delight customers and their end users over the short term (1-4 months), medium-term (4-36 months), and long-term (3-15 years). And it’s not just cool features and preparing for technology change coming down the road. We diligently allocate resources towards more mundane investment that we understand yields great products in ways that don’t score many points on RFPs; user experience/interface refinement, bug fixes, performance optimization, and investments in cybersecurity and privacy assurance. The potential threat of cybersecurity threats in the current era are difficult to overestimate and must be factored into all product and project decision-making.

Like custom tailored clothes, custom software sounds good. Except a custom suit doesn’t require regular cybersecurity updates, and new features don’t get added over time. We believe custom development should be a last resort, not a first instinct. We aim to deliver the flexibility customers need via configuration patterns that are unaffected by new releases. Otherwise, customers find themselves on an endless, disruptive and costly model updating and testing custom code with every update.

Clothes that almost fit are not good, and software is similar. While one-size-fits-all software systems work for many applications, they aren’t ideal when there are subtle but important differences between important customer workflows that can’t be accommodated (or without taking the path of custom code).

In focusing our engineering, we believe we have dual responsibilities. First, is to ensure we make ongoing success as straightforward as possible for our government customers who serve as producers of the technology systems for their end-users. Second, we must ensure their end-users as consumers of the system have a successful and positive experience. Sometimes, in terms of approaches and design, there can exist tensions between the best interests of these producers and consumers (what is most efficient for one can introduce hardship for the other); our goal is to effectively manage these tensions.

Beyond user experience (UX), we believe a focus on customer experience (CX) is at the heart of wonderful products and great software businesses. As part of our vision for the future, we’re developing a relentless focus on creating simple, intuitive products that reflect a deep understanding what our end users need to accomplish, and without focusing so much on making things beautiful that we inadvertently compromise usability.

In addition to building and delivering great technology, clients count on us to leverage our domain expertise and serve as candid, trusted advisors. While customers are almost always right in terms of outcomes they require, they’re not necessarily experts in software design and workflow engineering. If an approach to a requirement/customer request is suboptimal or will entail unintended future downsides that we believe outweigh the short-term benefits, we view it as our professional responsibility to respectfully challenge and collaborate to reach a more ideal approach.

People are not infallible. Power does not confer rightness. In fact, we have a no-jerk policy. These principles absolutely apply to us too; we strive to listen and approach every conversation with humility.

Eventually, it can be appropriate and necessary to deprecate product versions or patterns that have reached unavoidable obsolescence. We understand that customers who deploy production enterprise systems delivering vital operations must be able to rely on us as a vendor to ensure they can conduct business and assimilate change, at the speed they operate (within reason of course). It’s painful to admit, but on one occasion in our company history we believe we deprecated a product far too quickly. This negatively impacted certain customers and that experience deeply affected us too. The new generation of Journal Technologies leadership—indeed it is imbued in our collective corporate DNA—is committed to erring on the side of providing overly generous transition times with concurrent legacy support.

With production enterprise systems, it is possible to introduce risk and dysfunction by moving too slowly (think cybersecurity for everyone, or to ensure market competitiveness in the private sector). It is also dangerous to jump on the bandwagon of new technology trends or offerings before there is sufficient technology emergence and business model/leader traction. Except in special situations, a likely long-term pattern ought be identifiable; all else is gambling. Regardless of their preference to be innovators, early adopters, early majority, or laggards… our customers need to be able to rely on us to time things well; to neither unnecessarily rush, nor hesitate when an informed path forward is evident.

It is generally ill-advised to reinvent the wheel. When choosing third-party enabling technologies (e.g. frameworks, models, libraries) as we engineer our core technology, we seek to factor in both technology and non-technology factors to ensure our vendor choices are optimal and stand the test of time (specifically, hindsight).

We recognize many clients work with multiple industry vendors; we commit to engineering decisions choices that enable rather than impede diverse vendor ecosystems. Vendor lock-in isn’t good for customers, and we have a responsibility to facilitate mobility and mixed environments. Creating solutions that offer network effects is good.

We don’t recycle and rebill. Any project development we do for a specific client, we make available across our client base from that point forward at no incremental cost, provided it’s feasible. Ideally, and if of interest to numerous customers on an ongoing basis, we seek to integrate that work into our core products if this can be done efficiently and without creating product bloat.