I’m super excited to announce the launch of Blackbaud Labs. Blackbaud Labs is maintained by our product development team. We’re using it as a place to post research projects, samples, crazy ideas and more.

We want to grant you unparalleled access to the torrent of new technology that we have been releasing since the first quarter of this year. We have spent 3 years completely rebuilding our technology stack from the ground up and we’re ready for the whole world to have a look.

Front and center is the Infinity, the Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform that powers two of our shipping products Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing. We think it’s so cool we have posted a link on labs.blackbaud.com so anyone out there can take it for a test drive.

Expect to see a lot more on the labs. Oh, if you are a developer — stay tuned, we’re about to knock your socks off

Have fun!

We have been building our next generation application platform (code name Infinity) for almost two years now. I can’t talk in specifics at this point, but I can say that we have two brand new applications built on this platform ready to ship! Sorry, no dates will be revealed here, my friends.

Is that Linux? Yep.

So, as we exit one of the most intense R&D cycles in the 18 years I’ve been at Blackbaud, I took some time to reflect back on our initial goals for the platform and do a little internal report card of sorts around how I think we did. I won’t bore you with the details, or maybe I will in another post, but for now I’d like to look at one place where I give the team an A+.

You didn’t think I was going to blog about the “B” grade did you?

Goal: Embrace web standards to maximize interoperability

I know, it’s a mouthful, but I can’t figure out how to put it any more succinctly. Two years ago it was obvious to the team here that we needed to be web delivered and if we were going to be web delivered we should use as many standards-based technologies as possible.

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I was intrigued by this recent article about SAP and others incorporating collaboration features like wikis, forums, blogs and widgets into their products to help encourage communication among users. One of our main goals with products on the Infinity platform is to get beyond the idea of these apps being a ‘data storage’ tool and really focus on the ways in which the products facilitate and improve business processes. We’re already well on our way to meeting this goal through features like customizable, easy-to-use business transactions (such as sending receipts or posting to GL), and better integration of reporting data into these functions.

But a huge part of facilitating processes involves communication among people and departments. I’m wondering what we can do to better allow users to communicate with each other through our products? And where would this type of functionality be most useful? We’ve already taken steps in this direction in specific areas - Major Giving cultivation, for example, where we’re looking to improve the ability of fundraisers and their managers to communicate progress and status on their prospects. But I think this is an area we can explore further and really take advantage of some of the newer tools available to us.

It seems like there are some key characteristics of situations where in-product collaboration would be most useful:

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One of our usability engineers recently received some negative feedback around constituent records in Infinity. Unlike previous Blackbaud applications where records open in a new window, constituent records in Infinity open in the main window. So to leave the record, you don’t “close” anything, you just navigate away, like you would from a Web page. A couple of users had some trouble adjusting to this new approach.

These were existing RE users, so our hope is that they were just reacting to a change in the pattern they’ve grown accustomed to. But “they’ll get used to it” always makes designers really uneasy. Will they? How can we be sure this was an issue of familiarity and not a fundamental design flaw?

We’ll continue to test this issue with both RE and non-RE users, but I think this highlights the reality of user feedback and decision making in the design process. User input is one of several tools designers have at their disposal to help make the tough decisions, including design patterns, design principles, usability heuristics and personal experience. All of these are invaluable resources for informing the design process, but rarely do they make design decisions crystal clear. They are all very open to interpretation. In the end, it is still up to individual decision makers to make the “right” call based on the information they have.

For this reason, the real power in user-centered design comes not from a few usability tests and design heuristics, but from the development of a culture that puts a priority on user experience and encourages an ongoing, iterative process of feedback and refinement. This process doesn’t end when a product is released - existing features should be constantly re-evaluated and every new customer treated as another opportunity to evaluate your design decisions. Through these ‘layers,’ the experience becomes more and more refined:

When your decision makers are making user-informed, skillful design decisions, the difference between these levels are minimized. The process is then allowed to focus primarily on adding efficiency and smoothing out rough edges while functionality is gradually expanded. And when changes are required, this isn’t seen as a failure, but as a natural part of the design process.

Friday I was walking through the Product Development department when the Director of Core Technologies, Paul Gibson, waved me into a developer’s cube. I could tell by the look on their faces that they had something cool to show me. They sure did.

Paul Crowder (the dev) has been working on implementing platform-level support for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in our upcoming Infinity application platform. KPIs will be featured throughout future applications built on the platform (Galileo, RE8, Bullseye etc.) Apologies for all the code names, we’ll cover those in a future post.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that reflect the health of the organization. By quickly scanning an organization’s KPIs one should be able to get a solid idea on how things are tracking against the defined business goals. Some examples might be:

• Response Rate for a direct mail segment
• Number of gifts per day
• Avg days to close a major gift
• Gifts This Month
• Cost Per Dollar Raised

Those are just a few samples, but each one represents a single value that could be calculated and compared vs. an established goal.

Infinity’s KPI Platform

Editing a KPI Definition

Infinity’s base platform support provides the following for KPIs:

• A framework and UI for establishing, securing, and managing KPIs.
• A way to express a goal for a KPI.
• The ability to define warning and alert zones for a KPI as it progresses toward or deviates from it’s goal.
• An automated process to calculate KPI values and cache those values for quick rendering at a later time.
• A mechanism to back-calculate KPI values to establish historical trends.
• RSS support for KPI values so they can be monitored without running the application and logging in.
• A personal dashboard that can be customized by an end user to display the most important and relevant KPIs as the user sees fit.
• The ability to view the dashboard outside the application from any web browser without having to log in and navigate the application (assuming the user is authenticated).
• A stock set of KPI calculations “in the box”.
• Advanced support for creating custom KPIs using an open, extensible XML specification. (you’ll be hearing a lot about “specs” in the Infinity platform as I discuss it in future posts…)

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Putting 2006 behind us, of course it’s time to set down our resolutions for the new year. The thing that makes resolutions different from goals or plans is the idea that achieving them is primarily a matter of will or resolve. They can be…

• quantitative (lose 20 pounds!) or qualitative (eat healthier!)
• subjective (be a better person!) or objective (spend 10 hours a month helping out my favorite charity!)
• personal (appreciate the little things more!) or altruistic (make the world a better place!)

…but they are things that challenge us because they challenge our ability to overcome our limitations, our conditioning and our environment.

Of course, I’ve got my list of personal resolutions…..drop 20 pounds, finish the Cooper River Bridge Run in under 50 minutes, and complete a lengthy list of home improvement projects….just to name a few. However, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and come up with a New Year’s Resolution that has an impact on our Products team at Blackbaud and, by extension, the products we deliver. While surfing the web looking for some ideas, most of what I found centered on resolutions like “write more reusable code”, “comply with web standards” or “do more usability testing”; all worthwhile goals, but they didn’t capture my imagination or feel like what I was looking for.

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