Like most software companies, we spend a significant portion of our revenue on research and development. The good news is that the enterprise software space is in the middle of an explosive period of growth in innovation. The bad news is that it can be a challenge to filter through the noise to choose the features that will have the biggest positive impact on our customers.
To help reduce some of that noise, we’re focusing our 2020 technology roadmap on one overarching theme – usability. (Of course, that doesn’t mean we ignore things like reliability, scalability, and security – those are table stakes for any enterprise software company.)
Although our roadmap is a living plan, constantly adjusting and evolving, much of what you will see in 2020 will involve the following major areas:
Since around last May, we’ve been working on updating our desktop browser interface – not just to put on a fresh coat of paint, but because we’ve developed so much operational experience across the millions of user actions processed so far that we have a real opportunity to make it significantly easier for our users, even casual users, to accomplish what they logged on to do.
From completing a task assignment, to running a report, to finding a historical record, we are rethinking our approach to user workflows, and doing our best to eliminate any friction caused by the software. We know you log on to DevonWay to get a job done, not to loiter, and we want to get you in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Moreover, I’m happy to report that we’re staying true to the objectives we laid out a few months ago, so we should be able to start beta testing with select users early next year. The new interface will be backwards compatible with your implementation, so you don’t have to worry about us making any sudden, unannounced changes – we’ll work closely with each of our customers to develop a change management plan that works for your environment and your schedule.
Virtually all our products have some kind of mobile-centric use case. Mobile Work Packages, Observations, and Documents have constituted the bulk of our development efforts over the last couple of years, and while this work will continue, we also plan to spend a good amount of time on expanding the use cases supported by mobile.
This means faster, smoother viewing of assignments, the ability to complete a task from your phone, integrated notifications, the ability to search for data items, support for more form types, and much more.
Our applications gather a ton of data, much of it unstructured. One of the more time-consuming tasks our users currently deal with is categorizing that data and analyzing it to measure risk and performance. These are tasks that machine learning algorithms were designed to help with.
We’re partnering with another Bay Area company, RelationalAI, and one of our customers on a proof of concept project to see which algorithms work best with our types of data sets. Assuming the results are encouraging, which we expect, we’ll then commercialize the algorithms so that any of our customers can start to take advantage of this incredible technology.
Since we’re now on a pretty regular monthly cadence for both mobile and platform releases, we hope to get these features out to you as quickly as possible. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our blog for regular updates.
Until next time!