Aptify's CEO Blog

For years, organizations have attempted to integrate disparate data sources. While challenging in nature, this is achievable and many success stories have been written about groups that have moved to a consolidated information architecture. Once your data is in the same place and effectively organized, what's next?

Many groups end up treating their information systems simply as an electronic filing cabinet - destined to be a modern cousin to the old fashioned version. People input all sorts of data and pull reports, but the "system" doesn't automate a great deal of the process. In our opinion, the missing link is having the ability for the system to easily adapt to changes in business processes over time. Just as critical is the ability to automate those steps of a process that call out for automation. Our approach to this at Aptify is to provide an intuitive, graphical and business-oriented workflow modeling tool within our platform. This technology allows a business user to visualize a process and to change it over time, in many cases with limited or no IT support due to the graphical nature of the tools.

While the tools exist in our platform to automate a wide array of processes, it is important that an organization stay focused on leveraging these capabilities to align systems with their overarching strategy. Doing this right will result in the system enabling efficiency and rapid change, not simply storing and reporting on data.

Most organizations work on performance tuning in depth during an initial software implementation. After a go-live, however, it is fairly common to see performance tuning fall off the radar. The issue with this is that the database and related components are constantly evolving and require review on a recurring basis. We recommend to our clients to conduct a performance tuning review at least quarterly during the first year of use of our product and at least semi-annually thereafter. Some organizations can get away with less frequent performance tuning efforts and some need to evaluate their environment more often. The key thing to remember is that you have to build a plan to review performance on a recurring basis to make sure that system performance stays steady, or preferably improves. If you don’t, it is likely that performance will slowly degrade over time as the performance tuning that was done earlier is no longer optimal.

This is a key issue for all of your enterprise database software applications. The good news is that the incremental tuning exercises are typically not very time consuming once you establish a baseline. We recommend that people put this on their calendar along with other scheduled reviews such as a recurring security review and disaster recovery plan review.

The ability for a software application to be modified is now viewed as a critical requirement for most organizations. This is largely due to the dynamic environment we face where response times must constantly shrink while quality and innovation move forward rapidly. These days, most software companies state that they are flexible and have “toolkits” available to modify their applications. We see the evolution of the industry in this direction as being a very good thing for the market.

However, it is also important in such an environment where most vendors claim such flexibility to differentiate between a toolkit and a true platform. For well over a decade, Aptify has provided what we call the Application Lifecycle Platform, which is a comprehensive solution for developing, deploying and maintaining(including upgrading) enterprise business applications. We at Aptify use our own Application Lifecycle Platform for 100% of the development of business applications. In contrast, a toolkit is a set of separate tools that is used only by a customer to change a vendor’s application. The vendor doesn’t typically use such a toolkit to actually build the base applications. The distinction is an important one – if you and the vendor use different tools, you will always have a limitation to what you can do.

In the Aptify world, there is no such difference, the platform we provide our clients is the same one we use to build the applications to begin with. Our customers leverage this platform day in and day out to build not only extensions to our apps, but to create entirely new business applications. Underscoring the power and flexibility of our technology, Aptify’s Application Lifecycle Platform is being used by a major independent software vendor to produce a complete ERP suite for the publishing vertical.

When you compare software solutions, if flexibility is important to you, make sure you ask this key question of each vendor: Is the toolkit/platform something that you internally use to build 100% of the proposed solution? If the answer is not an unqualified yes, consider carefully the limitations before moving ahead.

Data migration is a critical element in any software implementation. Most organizations have a number of legacy data sources that they intend to migrate to a new system. Some of the data sources that commonly require migration are legacy database applications, Access databases, Excel files, and many other forms of unstructured and structured data. A common mistake in data migration planning is to wait too long to make data visible to end-users. It is not uncommon for project managers to consider data migration to be a technical task that has to go through a high degree of scripting and QA before a user-oriented data sample can be presented.

In our experience at Aptify, the earlier you can make data visible to users in a new system environment the more likely it is that the migration will be successful. It is indeed critical for a comprehensive data migration strategy to be crafted that will account for all of the data and relationships. However, it is also usually possible to structure the migration plan so that sub-components of data can be made visible to end-users sooner rather than later. Aptify implementations typically expose users to basic customer/contact data nearly immediately so that users can see “their data” in the new system as they begin familiarizing themselves with it. As the process moves forward, additional such subsets of data are incorporated into the users’ working environment. The technical quality assurance work required to ensure completeness and accuracy of the conversion are, of course, mandatory components of the process. The point here is that you can blend structured quality assurance cycles with early stage user visibility if you plan ahead for it. In our experience, this makes a world of difference in allowing end-users to understand how the new system relates to what they are used to.

As systems evolve and new technologies emerge there is an increasing need to exchange data between applications. While generalized standards such as XML and SOAP provide the foundation for easing such integration, they don’t provide a standard format for the data itself. This is because XML and SOAP are generic and applicable to any type of data. On the other hand, in each industry, data and relationships are different so the applicable formats need to be worked out by people within the field. It is therefore critical for industry groups to get together and define data standards that effectively capture the information that needs to move back and forth.

ASAE started just such a process and Aptify is actively supporting the effort. The ASAE Data Standard is a work in progress and has made significant headway towards establishing an initial data standard for associations to share constituent and organization data. The standard structures information about constituents and organizations so that any system that supports it can easily interpret and integrate the data. The greatest benefit of a standard is that all compliant software applications and services will be able to use the standard without any systems integration coding. This promotes an increased level of interoperability between systems and will lead to more functionality and flexibility. We are proud to support the ASAE standards effort and have already completed testing of the data standard within our software. After ratification of the new standard is complete, we plan to quickly introduce support for it in our product.

Many people ask how the name Aptify came to fruition. Aptify is a name that represents a number of values that we believe are of great importance in working as a team for the benefit of our clients. Aptify is not a word in the English language (or any other language of which I’m aware). We decided to select a name that included parts of words that connoted values that were meaningful and aligned with our corporate culture and mission. Aptify has two parts – “apt” and “ify”. 

Aptify therefore literally means “to make apt”. In the context of Aptify software, this translates into “to make exactly suitable.” Since Aptify software is specifically designed to accommodate and promote change, the name perfectly suits our business purpose – to provide solutions that are appropriate and exactly suited to our customers’ evolving business needs.

We are very pleased to make available the latest release of Aptify.com. This web site has been completely redesigned with the goal of making information easily available to all types of users. We have highlighted our industry solutions and platform technology and have included a significantly increased amount of information on the company. Many of the changes were driven by feedback from the community and we look forward to your further input on how Aptify.com can continue to evolve.

When we work with our clients, one of the most common challenges is designing a taxonomy, or classification model, that will integrate disparate types of content in a way that makes sense to the consumers of that information. If you want to have a web site that is logical to the end-user, integrates content from sources such as document archives, a CMS, databases, and 3rd party syndication sources, you must ensure that the taxonomy is clearly defined and consistent. This is an area that is frequently underemphasized in our experience. Some organizations feel they can reduce focus on this type of work during early phase projects since the visibility is usually low (initially). A well planned taxonomy is much like a foundation for a home or building - you have to dig deep and work very hard before seeing the benefits and coming above surface. But if you make that investment in a solid foundation you can keep building higher than without one.

There are many approaches to taxonomies. The central theme that we believe must not be lost upon the designers of the taxonomy is that it must make logical sense to a consumer/end-user of the information without detailed explanation. A good taxonomy should be intuitive, avoid redundancy, and allow both separation and aggregation of content across multiple media types, locations and sources.

In working with a number of client organizations one of the common trends we see is that IT-driven BI projects tend to have a difficult time in keeping up with user needs. For this reason, we have been focusing a large pool of resources on driving some of the most commonly required BI capabilities into the hands of end-users. While the most in-depth BI requirements still demand fairly astute technical skills, we believe that the end-user having the power to build on-the-fly BI views for perhaps 80-90% of their common needs will greatly change how often BI is actually put to use. We are very interested in getting feedback from the community on where people are using BI, where projects have been succesful, and where they have not been.

A growing trend among association clients we work with is the desire to drive social-networking features into their web presence. We currently are supporting this with a variety of our clients through integration with popular social networking web sites as well as functionality that has been directly incorporated into the Aptify e-Business Suite that supports common needs. Social networking has great promise for many member driven organizations as it helps build more momentum around the community of individuals and can leverage relationships between those people in a way that is difficult to replicate in an off-line world.

In some membership organizations, social networking is looked at as being a trend amongst the younger generations of members. However, we are seeing trends where this is greatly picking up across a wide variety of age groups and demographics. We plan to conduct more in-depth research across a wide range of organizations in the community to determine current and future plans for social networking and would like to receive input on how people see this technology being used now and in the future.