Holmes Corporation: Customizing education and certification with Machine Learning

Case Study

Customizing education with Machine Learning

Holmes Corporation

Holmes Corporation partnered with SDG to customize their professional education and certification program using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Challenges

Varying data sources
Access to actionable data in real-time
Limited capacity & tight timeline

SDG Solutions

AI and ML learning models
Model-ready data sets
Consumer personas
Data lakes in Azure

Elevating the learning experience

Holmes Corporation (HC) designs and delivers personalized and adaptive educational products for individuals worldwide seeking professional credentials and certifications. Through strong partnerships with professional associations, colleges, universities, and other global training providers, they have helped more than 2 million professionals in more than 200 countries prepare for and earn globally recognized credentials. HC’s association partners’ members are busy professionals with diverse job functions and varying levels of education and career seniority. The time they can allocate to professional development and learning is limited, so delivering training solutions that target their knowledge gaps is critical.

Operating for more than 50 years, HC has amassed a vast storehouse of training content, performance data, and consumer information. HC’s technology and product leaders wisely identified that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology might help them better utilize this data, using learners’ time more efficiently while still teaching and assessing the necessary professional skills. To explore these new concepts, HC augmented their in-house talent with targeted AI and ML technical expertise from SDG.

Assessing Data Readiness

After exploring the complexities of HC’s market and business, SDG assessed HC’s data systems and sources. SDG’s analysts recommended that HC consolidate their data sources by building data lakes in HC’s Microsoft Azure cloud environment. This critical step normalized data from varying sources into a clean, centralized, model-ready dataset.

Co-exploring possibilities

SDG and HC then collaborated to explore ways to use this data to address high-potential business opportunities. Together, they paired technical analysis with research into the user experience to address the business goals of HC’s professional association customers and their member-learners.

Highlights of Co-exploration

The SDG and HC teams used ML clustering techniques to identify and develop consistent pathways based on learner classifications (based on learner profile data) and guide the user experience.
Using a Machine Learning model, SDG consultants created an explainability analysis to identify an optimal study path for each student persona.

Building the solution

The descriptive modeling that helped HC understand their students served as the foundation for the next step: creating a more adaptive and personalized “My Study Plan” solution, using AI and ML technology and techniques.

This enhanced system combined best practices from the field of educational data mining with individual student performance data to recommend specific content to individual students. Essentially, the team deployed an AI model at an online endpoint, where, based on the student’s most recent study results, API calls generate real-time recommendations advising each student on where to focus their study time.

Our collaboration with SDG helped us expedite the incorporation of AI and ML technologies into our products to deliver a more adaptive and personalized learning experience to our customers and a leading-edge product for our association partners. These enhancements have contributed to a 35% reduction in required study time for learners by focusing on their knowledge gaps and have improved certification exam performance. SDG’s consultants were great partners not just in technical development, but in machine learning strategy and system design.

Elizabeth Moore, VP Product Development

Holmes Corporation

An adaptive, streamlined experience

The enhanced “My Study Plan” ensures that each student has a personalized educational path that meets their unique learning and assessment needs while making most efficient use of their time. To confirm the model is performing as intended, the SDG team built monitoring dashboards using Azure Responsible AI for the HC team to leverage. The entire system allows HC and its clients to understand model performance, examine model predictions and real-world outcomes, and ensure optimal outcomes for HC, their professional association customers, and those associations’ member-learners. With these advancements, HC is setting a new standard in professional education, empowering learners to achieve their goals with precision and confidence.

HealthPartners: Transforming Healthcare Operations

Case Study

Transforming Healthcare Operations

Health Partners

HealthPartners, a leading healthcare and insurance organization, partnered with SDG to modernize critical business workflows using a cost-effective low-code solution.

Challenges

Manual data input and output

Siloed information

Limited tracking and reporting

SDG Solutions

Solution analysis and design
Low-code development
Microsoft Power Platform suite
Training, documentation and upskilling

Maximizing efficiency

HealthPartners is an integrated, non-profit healthcare provider and health insurance organization serving more than 1.8 million medical and dental health plan members nationwide.

The HealthPartners Pharmacy Programs team is responsible for overseeing a complex fee schedule and labor-intensive drug price coding process. To ensure accurate claim adjudication and reimbursement to their contracted specialty pharmacies, this team manages records of over 3,500 national drug codes (NDCs), which they associate with unique pricing parameters based on an individual pharmacy’s business rules.

Historically, the Pharmacy Programs team has managed this data and these business rules using carefully maintained spreadsheets and manual workflows. As their network expanded, HealthPartners encountered serious challenges with maintenance, accuracy, and reporting. Additionally, the team wasn’t able to easily integrate drug and pharmacy data with other HealthPartners systems, resulting in information silos that threatened efficiency and accuracy.

Embracing low code solutions

To address these problems, HealthPartners turned to custom enterprise software development consultancy SDG. After analyzing the HealthPartners team’s workflows, document structure, and collaboration tools, SDG recommended a low-code solution using Microsoft’s Power Platform suite of low-code applications. This architecture meant a new application could be implemented with minimal custom code – which would contain costs, accelerate development time, and ease the burden of long-term maintenance.

An architecture built for lasting success

SDG’s team of analysts, engineers, and designers then collaborated closely with the HealthPartners’ team to design and implement the Power Platform solution. They centralized information in a cloud-based Dataverse data platform, enabled new insights through PowerBI reporting and analytics, and quickly built new workflows and interfaces using the Power Apps drag-and-drop web interface and prebuilt components.

Success in weeks

The Pharmacy Programs team was up and running on the new system within weeks, quickly realizing the benefits of the new solution’s modernized architecture, cloud-based integrations, and a user-friendly interface. The members of the HealthPartners Pharmacy Programs team were especially impressed by the project team’s speed and collaboration.

Throughout the project, SDG made sure to equip the HealthPartners team with documentation, training, and new skills. Because of the smooth handover and thoughtful implementation, the HealthPartners Pharmacy Programs team is confident and excited that they’ll be able to extend the new system themselves through the Power Platform suite, without needing to engage costly custom development services.

“This project was amazing! I’ve never seen an application of this complexity get built so fast. A legacy project would have taken at least a year or more to roll out something like this.”

Liz Fuller – Information Technology Manager at HealthPartners

Low code in motion

By implementing a low-code solution, the HealthPartners team has streamlined processes that once took hours into mere minutes. They’re communicating more effectively, they’ve dramatically reduced claim adjudication issues, and they’ve improved their ability to serve their customers – all with fewer technical limitations.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Learn more about HealthPartners.

Reducing global methane emissions (company confidential)

Case Study

Reducing global methane emissions

Global climate advocacy organization (company confidential)

A global non-profit climate advocacy organization partnered with a marketing and strategy firm and SDG to transform their complex methane emissions calculation tool into a sophisticated, easy to use, and scalable cloud-based web app.

Challenges

Complexity of the solution
Geopolitical nuances
Deep industry data
Diverse policy content sources
Globally distributed stakeholders

SDG Solutions

Product mindset
Product leadership
AWS Cloud Architecture
Software engineering

Using data to develop effective global climate policy

Our customer is a world leading climate advocacy organization working to advance technology and policy changes needed to achieve a zero-emissions, high-energy planet at an affordable cost. Methane emissions are 80x more damaging than carbon dioxide and reducing them is critical for our planet to stay within the 1.5 degree warming threshold. The organization works with governments, industry leaders, and other NGO’s across the globe to affect deep, global reductions in methane emissions to protect against the risk of irreversible changes to our climate.

To that end, they developed a Methane abatement tool, which allows countries to record and continually refine their emissions estimations based on the best available information about a country’s oil and gas industry. By using the emissions and inventory calculations in the tool, countries can explore variables and specific policy options that can result in pollution reduction. While the original spreadsheet-based solution was impressive, it was inherently complex, and not easy to use, maintain or scale simultaneously across multiple country engagements. A longer-term, more user-friendly solution was necessary and the customer engaged with their marketing partner and SDG to build it.

An ambitious vision

As a strategic partner to the organization, the marketing firm conceived a winning product strategy to transform the existing tool from a heavily manual process into a powerful web- and cloud-based software application. Turning this vision into reality required deep technical knowledge, so they engaged SDG to form a strong product development team. Together with the customer’s policy and industry experts, the team developed a state-of-the-art user experience, and an innovative, data-driven approach for the new solution, transforming it into a dynamic, adaptable and accessible platform.

SDG and the marketing and strategy firm worked to deliver a scalable product strategy and design a technical architecture using a combination of third-party tools and custom software. As part of the design and system development work, and after comprehensive review of various platforms, the team’s architects and designers agreed that an AWS-based solution would provide the combination of scalability, user experience and performance required for the new application and its mission-critical purpose.

A scalable solution

The new application runs on an AWS cloud-based, 3-tier, service-based architecture that was tailored to the needs of the organization’s globally distributed staff and user base. The user experience layer comprises web pages, forms, data visualizations, and content repositories custom-designed by the product team and delivered through a CMS and other integrated front-end tools running on Amazon Web Service (AWS).

While this organization has a global impact, they have a limited IT infrastructure capability and staff, and the cost of building and managing an on-prem solution and data center would prove untenable. With the AWS technology that the team and SDG implemented, the application can run on a serverless architecture that scales automatically to handle load from users across the world. Because of this architecture, the customer’s limited IT staff can offload management of the system to the cloud, while their analysts, researchers, and policy advisors can confidently collaborate with various country stakeholders using a powerful, modern web application.

Tackling climate change with AWS

In 2023 the pilot of the new application was launched in their AWS environment, and team members have begun to import climate and policy data into the new system. The new application will accelerate the ability to forecast and establish abatement targets and recommend mitigation plans and policy changes for countries using the platform – which in turn will result in targeted impact and reduced methane emissions from the oil and gas industry across the globe.

The modernized version of the tool has allowed them to expand their engagement and influence. With their modernized application up and running, this customer is now poised to work with more countries and institutions, develop more comprehensive policy solutions, and accelerate their efforts to decarbonize the global energy system.

Orange Tree: Customized online employment screening

Case Study

Custom online employment screening

Orange Tree Employment Screening

Orange Tree, a provider of background screening and drug testing services sought SDG’s help to shift to an online platform and acquire new customers.

Challenges

Competitive differentiation
Legacy integrations
3rd party connectivity
Legal and regulatory environment

SDG Solutions

Product transformation
Product leadership
Experience design
AWS Cloud engineering
Application development

Winning market through digital

Orange Tree Employment Screening is a leading provider of pre-employment background screening and drug testing services. With more than 20 years in the industry, Orange Tree offers customized solutions and helps customers design a background screening program that is in their own best interest, balancing risk, cost, and speed. Competing providers offer the ability to purchase background screening services within an online marketplace, but without the ability to fully customize the solution. Orange Tree sought to build a fully customizable, digital-first marketplace to allow customers to browse and purchase background screening services. Their belief was that this online capability would not only attract new clients, but also reduce the time required to implement and support these services.

Orange Tree engaged SDG and adopted our Innovation Framework to make this new online platform a reality.

User centric approach

While Orange Tree understood the needs of their clients, they recognized the additional benefit of including them in product design. With this understanding, our team interviewed users to understand their needs and validate concepts prior to building. They also conducted market research and looked at an entire client experience, not just the experience within the digital commerce product. The result was a clear understanding of value and a digital product that brought users through a seamless experience.

Feasible architecture

The defined business goals and user needs, coupled with the current and future technology roadmap for this customer, provided the necessary input to derive an architecture. Orange Tree’s existing AWS cloud experience was leveraged and expanded to build a hybrid architecture for this effort. As part of this transformation, SDG consultants mentored the customers architect developers on the proper application of the new technology.

Partnering on the product journey

The challenge in front of Orange Tree was building the digital product while simultaneously developing a product leadership capability within their organization. They leaned heavily on SDG to guide them through the formulation of the product, onboard the full-time product team members, and led them through the completion of the build. Following the initial delivery of the digital product, SDG remained involved in coaching the Orange Trees’ product leaders.

SDG was an invaluable partner in helping Orange Tree design, build, and launch new digital products that are critical to our business strategy. From product strategy to user research to software development, SDG’s consultants guided us through a thoughtful process and supported our team with their insights and expertise. We really appreciate the partnership.

Ryan Dotson

CTO

A new source of growth

The innovation approach used on this effort ensures that the digital product meets the needs of the business, users, and customers. This self-service commerce product provides a new and important source of revenue for Orange Tree, with the ability to acquire new customers quickly. Additionally, the enterprise perspective and user experience focus provides the foundation of a seamless experience for their customers.

African-american woman wearing a tan blazer smiling and gesturing with both hands palms up above a table to a light-skinned woman with brown hair wearing a black top.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Learn more about Orange Tree Employment Screening.

Sentera: Improving Outcomes for Growers

Case Study

Improving Outcomes for Growers

Sentera

AI powered agriculture insights leader Sentera, partnered with SDG to re-imagine their flagship software platform product.

Challenges

Engineer driven design
Complexity of solution
Data visualization

SDG Solutions

Product mindset
Product leadership
Experience design
Prototype development

Driving agricultural value

Sentera uses multiple data sources, like satellites, drones, on-field machines, and human observers, to populate a comprehensive data lake. With their data, they generate in-season analytics and intelligence to increase precision and efficiency, improve visibility to supply chains, or measure and promote land stewardship and sustainability. Their technology delivers time-sensitive insights that optimize decisions and improve outcomes to drive agricultural value.

Sentera’s products were created by engineers with deep experience in sophisticated aerospace technology, but Sentera’s executive leadership understood that it was the outcome – the insights gathered through this technology – that provided the real value to their customers. They recognized the strategic importance of having a strong software product designed in a way that was easy to use and understand, enabling their users to make sound agricultural decisions. Accomplishing this would require the organization to adopt a different mindset, shifting the focus from delivering engineering capabilities to a more holistic approach that packages insights in a way that more directly maps to customer value.

Shifting the Mindset

Sentera chose SDG as their partner to articulate and accelerate this ambitious strategy and lead the efforts to embed this digital product mindset across the organization.

Creating the vision

To envision a new product, SDG product strategists used a multitude of techniques to start establishing priorities and clarifying a product strategy. They participated in the Sentera product council, led engineering and business teams through collaborative planning workshops and collaborated with the Sentera team to build a strategic, thematic roadmap for its flagship software product. Through these activities, the team created a compelling product vision and a plan to achieve it.

User research

Sentera’s users – agronomists, growers and enterprise customers – have unique needs, often dealing with intense pressure, harsh conditions and complex business relationships. SDG conducted user interviews and completed a heuristic analysis of existing applications to understand their true needs. As part of this analysis, engineers visited farms and co-ops where they learned first hand how Sentera’s products are used. The findings were used to prototype an innovative new digital experience aligning Sentera, and their users, with the vision.

Forming product teams

Establishing a product based organizational structure was key to Sentera becoming a product focused company. SDG helped Sentera’s executives organize their staff into “product teams”, hire a new head of product, and increase their investment in experience design. SDG consultants also engaged in discussions on product management, design, and development topics, and helped Sentera’s entire team re-think how they establish priorities, understand their customers and ship solutions.

Becoming a digital product company

Sentera has re-imagined their product as a comprehensive agronomic insights, decision-making, and communication platform that works for all users. In Sentera’s new product strategy, the drones are a feature of the agronomic insight’s product, not the reverse. Guided by this product strategy, Sentera is well on their way to becoming a digital product company, driven by deep understanding of their users and led by the value they can offer their market, not just the sophistication of their engineering.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Yale University: Ivy League Portal Product

Case Study

Ivy League Portal Product

Yale University

One of the world’s most prestigious universities partnered with SDG to evaluate, select, and implement a portal framework to serve its campus community — in just six weeks.

Challenges

Diverse customer personas
High-end experience needs
Compressed timelines

SDG Solutions

Platform architecture
Digital strategy
Portal implementation
Responsive UI development

World-class university partners with SDG on a digital portal product

Selecting a platform on which to develop your campus infrastructure is no easy task. Yale University, one of the world’s most selective and prestigious universities, wanted to create a centralized, digital “hub” as the starting point for the online services they offered to support their students, faculty, and staff.

Through an internal evaluation process, Yale’s IT team compared options and selected finalists. But to make their final selection and begin the implementation, they wanted the first-hand knowledge that comes with implementation experience and understanding of portal architectures for the unique needs of higher education. So Yale turned to SDG.

Comprehensive requirements

Theming and customizable HTML & CSS
Responsive design and mobile accessibility
Targeted content by role
Plugin architecture for custom development
Communities and social capabilities for blogs, micro-blogging and forums
Internal and external system integration
Federated authentication
Cloud-based hosting

SDG roles

Agile project delivery
Application architecture and development
Fully responsive user experience development
Documentation and training

Technologies used

Amazon Web Services
Spring & Spring MVC Portlet
Ant
Maven
Alloy UI
Bootstrap
HTML5
Sass
SalesForce
Tomcat
MySQL

The solution

Yale had developed evaluation criteria to compare portal options. These criteria included a defined set of user stories, an assessment of the system’s user experience and user interface capabilities, as well as integrations with both Salesforce and ServiceNow. The comparison was time-boxed as a six-week effort.

SDG was chosen to partner with Yale through the evaluation and represent the portal product team throughout this evaluation. Over the course of the project, SDG guided the portal implementation from requirements through implementation and documentation. Additionally, Yale relied on SDG’s deep portal and higher education experience to provide a strategic perspective on building an implementation team and understanding the total cost of ownership.

All images provided by Yale University. Photo credits: “Campus Walk” by Dan Renzetti; “Bass Tower” by Jack Devlin; “Directed Studies Orientation 2015” by Michael Marsland.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

A Digital Campus for Higher Education (Company Confidential)

Case Study

A Digital Campus for Higher Education

Online university (company confidential)

A leading online university partnered with SDG to build a complete campus experience, digitally.

Challenges

Heavily regulated industry
Complex integrations
Multiple user types
Building a community

SDG Solutions

Project delivery
Solution architecture
Application development
DevOps & Infrastructure

More than just a portal, an online university needed a digital campus

Online universities depend on digital technology to deliver the entire higher education experience to their students, including facilitating learning, assesing students, supporting collaboration, and managing the many administrative and support functions of campus life, from financial aid to registration to libraries and research.

Our customer is one of the world’s most successful and prominent online-only universities. It recognized that its portfolio of technologies and services from different vendors was creating a disjointed and ineffcient experience for students. Students needed to use an ERP system for adminstrative transactions, a Learning Management System (LMS) for online courses, and other third-party and homegrown resources for advising, student support, and other services.

Facing pressures from both users and competitors, they planned to implement a new digital experience, which they envisioned as a virtual campus, to unify all the resources and tools necessary for students and faculty to succeed.

The campus vision

The university’s digital product and technology teams collaborated with SDG to implement a vision that included essential components of the university experience:

Academic learning through a third-party Learning Management System (LMS).
Adminstrative tools from Student Information Systems (SIS) and ERP applications.
Academic support resources including both third-party and custom-made web resources.
A private community of students, faculty, and alumni, including discussions, contacts, and academic groups.

And they needed the new system to be:

Personalized and user-friendly
Easy to integrate with existing technologies
Flexible, reliable, and state-of-the-art
Supportive of academic progresses

Building the solution together

After analyzing over 40 different objectives, the SDG team customized a solution that delivered the vision of university leadership. Recognizing the need for efficiency, speed and reliability, SDG recommended and then implemented a Java-based portal framework to serve as the university’s new platform. In addition, SDG and university technologists devised a service-oriented architecture (SOA) layer to connect existing systems and allow data to flow freely between them. Finally, SDG provided quality assurance to ensure a smooth rollout to the entire university community.

Benefits of the new system

Upgraded personal and professional networking features
On-demand access to information
Easy navigation between platforms
Enhanced interface and virtual university experience
Communities functionality, including profiles, groups, discussions, and chat

Roles played by SDG

Strategic alignment
Program planning and project delivery
Infrastructure and tool selection
User experience design
Application development and integration architecture
Off-shore quality assurance management

Technologies used

Java
Liferay Enterprise
Portal PeopleSoft ERP
Blackboard
AJAX
Spring WebServices
Hibernate
Offshore Testing
Agile Project Management

A Note on Confidential Case Studies

This customer preferred that we keep their identity confidential, so we haven’t named them in this case study. While we’re proud of our work on this project, SDG respects our customers’ wishes.

All photographs courtesy of Unsplash.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: Preserving Ancient Manuscripts

Case Study

Preserving Ancient Manuscripts with Technology

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

St. John’s University’s Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and SDG collaborated on a web-based application for cataloging ancient manuscripts.

Challenges

Audience of global scholars
Complex visualizations
Archival quality and accuracy
Grant-based funding sources

SDG Solutions

Digital strategy
Technical architecture
Mobile product development
User experience

Using modern software to manage ancient documents

Since 1965, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (SJU) has been dedicated to the preservation of manuscripts from around the world through the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).

Specifically, HMML’s scholars have sought out areas where historical artifacts are in danger—whether through disaster, conflict, or other circumstances. Their goal is to ensure that these texts remain intact for the future.

While printed texts can be found in various libraries and museums, manuscripts are unique, hand-written documents, whose value is immeasurable for scholars of paleography, codicology, and numerous other disciplines.

Cataloging such documents involves taking high-resolution photographs of each page and providing detailed bibliographic information for reference.

In accordance with the Benedictine tradition, SJU scholars have continually aimed to make use of the best available technologies. So as they planned how to preserve manuscripts with an audience of global scholars, they sought to incorporate such technologies into their library.

Partnering with SDG to deliver a Virtual Reading Room

HMML’s vision was a Virtual HMML Reading Room (vHMML)—a unique web application where global scholars could view manuscripts, share research, and work with local, on site staff to archive new materials from active worksites. It was essential that the new format would allow for the digital reproduction and cataloging of manuscripts before they faced destruction.

HMML partnered with SDG create this solution. The goal: to create a cloud-hosted solution that would allow HMML staff to easily update website content and provide an updated look in anticipation of increased web traffic following a featured story on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

For an institution that is completely funded by grants and donations, national media coverage of this magnitude represented a unique opportunity to expose the work HMML was doing to a massive audience of potential donors. With this in mind, one additional goal was to guarantee that the site could continue to deliver content with low latency during a flood of traffic. All of these goals had to be accomplished under a tight timeline with an unmovable deadline: the site had to be live when the 60 Minutes episode aired.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library virtual reading room

Global reach

As of 2017, HMML is actively collecting manuscripts from Mali, Egypt, Ethiopia and a number of locations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. At the time SDG was engaged to help with this project, the effort to create the new system had been underway for over 18 months as a collaborative effort between 3 separate teams who were struggling to produce a viable product.

Ambitious goals

HMML and SDG collaborated to achieve these goals:

Provide a fresh look that aligned with HMML branding
Include an interactive map & manuscript tour
Present a stronger, more cohesive visual mission statement
Allow for simple content management
Remove on-premise IT dependency
Guarantee uptime under heavy load
Deliver content with low latency for all of HMML’s global audience
Support any device

A full range of skills

SDG used a full complement of product skills throughout the partnership. including:

Agile project delivery and management
Business analysis
Quality assurance
UI/UX design
Enterprise architecture and application development
Infrastructure/DevOps support
Documentation and training

An elegant, scalable solution

The resulting solution was a WordPress website running in the AWS Cloud on Amazon EC2, RDS, SES and CloudFront.

WordPress delivered the simple content management capability that HMML desired and AWS services provided a way to quickly implement enterprise grade solutions to the infrastructure, delivery and performance goals of the project. While using the available funds in a responsible way and managing a very aggressive timeline SDG was able to create a site with an elegant design and an architecture that could scale to meet demand.

The new solution features:

A branded, user-centric user interface
Cross-device compatibility
Administrative tools and security to manage content creation
Cloud deployment to eliminate IT dependency
Comprehensive keyword search
Global caching of content at edge locations around the world
Continuous integration pipeline management

All images courtesy of Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Unisys: A Multi-Tenant Business Services Aggregator

Case Study

Unisys

Global IT leader Unisys partners with SDG on mission-critical digital product design and development.

Challenges

Diverse customer personas
Competitive market
Complex integrations

SDG Solutions

Product strategy
Roadmapping & prioritization
Vision & value proposition
Experience design
Application development

Solidifying a leadership position

Unisys deploys the largest single instance multi-tenant Liferay installation in the world. Over 75 of the world’s largest and most successful companies use Unisys’s portal to manage technology services across end-user, IT operations, and executive roles. However, the portal only functioned in a desktop browser and the self-service functionality, dashboards, and user experience lagged behind user expectations.

SDG was challenged with creating a new fully responsive user experience in direct replacement of the application’s legacy user interfaces. Additionally, new custom self-service functionality and dashboards were created to extend the capabilities of the platform. Unisys’s goal was to solidify their position as the clear market leader in managed IT services — a goal which SDG helped them achieve.

Building the solution together

SDG led the software development lifecycle, including project management, business analysis, user experience design, architecture, development, and quality assurance. The team designed and implemented a world-class responsive web interface which was optimized against leading devices and operating systems. Together, the Unisys and SDG team focused on enabling configuration versus customization to enable Unisys’s clients to include their own branding within the system. This included custom configurations for icons, labels, colors, and imagery as well as content.

Coupled with user specific localization including multi-lingual support, these configurations empower administrators with unmatched control over their sites. Industry leading frameworks and libraries decrease long-term cost of ownership. Device specific testing for current OS/browser version minus one (N-1) compatibility was completed.

Ambitious vision

Unisys envisioned a system that offered:

A world-class user experience from any modern device
Support for simultaneous highly personalized corporate brands
Theme customization through configuration alone
Personalized content and functionality based on user role and organization
Easily extensible and adaptable feature deployment
Commercial quality found in PaaS offerings

Goals achieved

Benefits of the new system included:

Ability to market and sell the leading managed services offering in existence
Easily branded sites for over 75 customers on a single implementation
Language localization for menus and content
Foundation to upsell and cross-sell additional services
Reduced total cost of ownership through custom configurations
Single codebase and set of servers to maintain
Management of IT services from any connected device

SDG expertise

Unisys relies on SDG for deep expertise in:

Agile project delivery
Fully responsive user experience design
Application architecture and development
Multi-enterprise integration architecture
Device specific quality assurance

SDG consultants played a variety of roles

Agile project delivery and management
Business analysis
Enterprise architecture and application development
Fully responsive user experience development
Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
Documentation and training

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

All photographs courtesy of Unsplash.

New York University: Building the Global Campus

Case Study

Building the Global Campus

New York University

New York University (NYU) and SDG partnered to create an award-winning, online campus to support their students, staff and faculty.

Challenges

Students, faculty, staff
International user base
Legacy systems
Academic scheduling

SDG Solutions

Product Strategy
Enterprise Architecture
User Experience
Technology Delivery
CMS implementation
Machine Learning
AWS Cloud Adoption

Global Reach

Entering a phase of growth beyond New York City to three primary campuses and dozens of satellite locations, NYU desired a digital portal focused on supporting students, faculty, and staff. This digital campus would integrate with services to intelligently present a custom-tailored experience to each user based on that user’s roles, needs, activity, location, and preferences.

Additionally, NYU envisioned a system that would:

Feature a modern, responsive design.
Integrate numerous student, staff, and faculty services.
Foster connections between people across the university.
Remain highly available and performant for a global audience.
Be flexible to maximize the speed-to-market for future development.

It begins with planning

Based on our extensive portal experience as well as our commitment to academia, NYU engaged SDG to refine and implement NYU’s vision. This included:

Providing guidance through planning phase.
Gathering requirements.
Partnering with NYU to refine the user experience vision.
Recommending technology and enterprise architecture.

Guiding the process

SDG developed a robust algorithm to determine the relative “hotness” of content and functionality for each user based upon that individual’s history of interactions. In addition, SDG:

Oversaw system development and configuration.
Coordinated deployments.
Implemented mature product management and software development practices.

SDG consultants played a variety of roles

Agile project delivery and management
Business analysis
Enterprise architecture and application development
Fully responsive user experience development
Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
Documentation and training

Exceeding Expections

The new NYU portal, branded Global Home, received a great reception at launch, exceeding expectations from the original vision.

Going forward, NYU Global Home is positioned to support the current needs of the university, and allows the flexibility to create and differentiate experiences to meet the changing needs of faculty, staff and applicants, as well as individual schools and programs.

To read more success stories, visit the our work page.

Images courtesy of Unsplash and NYU.