VERN: Hello and welcome. This is Vern Dosch, and this is the eighth in a series of podcasts that we're doing for our employees. The topic is the acceleration plan that has been put in place that has been approved by our Board of Directors. Literally this plan will affect every single NISC employee, every single division, directly or indirectly. And so the purpose of these podcasts is to answer that question. What does the acceleration plan do for my division? How possibly could it impact me? So with me today we have Dan Wilbanks. Dan is the Vice President of Research, Development and Quality, NISC's Chief Operating Officer, and a 30-plus year employee. And, Dan, I think it's fair to say that the acceleration initiative has a pretty significant impact on research and development. Of course, this isn't your first rodeo. Right? I mean you've been through multiple generations of software, and that experience is absolutely invaluable to the process. So as you think about the discussions over the last couple of months with the Vice President group as we prepared this strategy and then went into our Board in January and received their approval, in terms of research and development, obviously we're talking about Connect. Connect is the next greatest thing in terms of development, the next generation of software within NISC. What is your vision, Dan, for Connect? DAN: So the vision of Connect kind of hits a bunch of different areas. It started out as a new process for development for us, to develop in a role-based manner so we could focus the business processes to that role. It's also a new process where we have the Members involved more. Our user experience team has been actively for a couple of years going out and visiting Members, and as new things are prototyped, they go out and talk with them. So it's a whole new process. For utility the vision for Connect has been a little bit different. We're using the utility base, and it's going to be really less disruptive for them and that was the whole plan - that our Members on utility side could put in Connect one person at a time, one group at a time, one role at a time if they want. They don't have to go through a big conversion, which we all know they don't like and we don't necessarily like. On our telecom side it's a little bit different. The vision for Connect is to combine and unify the platforms for utility and telecom. We're upgrading some technology on the telecom side; we currently have a progress database, and we're getting away from that. We're moving into the Oracle database, so there's a number of things going on on the telecom side as well as a whole new interface and many new features for the telecom side. So telecom vision overall is new features and new technology. It's a chance you don't ever add new features and redo a big project like this without looking at the technology also. So it's a chance for us to upgrade the technology and to get us more Cloud-friendly for moving to the future. VERN: Dan, when I listen to you describe how you're going about the design and the development of Connect, how the Members are involved to a large extent early on, before we're doing any coding at all. I think back to the last generation and the mantra was, right, we're not going to write a single line of code until the database is designed, until the reports are designed, until functionality is designed, until all screens are designed, and for the most part our Members didn't even see a screen until they were getting ready for their conversion. Today that's flipped around completely. I mean you're kind of using an iterative process; you're involving the end user early on. I mean their fingerprints are all over this software and that has to be a pretty major change for you and your employees. Can you talk about how that's impacting the way you're looking at these projects and moving forward with the projects and how potentially it impacts our Members also? DAN: Well yeah, from the Member's side, what we found is they love to be involved and they love to help us. They'll take time when our product team will go out and do some research with them. They take time when our user experience team goes out and does testing. They free up people and they're very excited about it. And what we're finding, Vern, is that when we do send out these screens, there's very little fine-tuning to do with them. We know they went through the click-through prototypes and they work and they make sense to them. We've done some fine-tuning. Basically the way things used to be as we'd get them done, then the fine-tuning was done with the first 5, 10, 20 Members that go on and you have a little bit of upheaval during that. We're finding with iVUE Connect there's a lot lot less of that and it's more focused. And the Members have input. They like that. So we're not going back to the old ways. I think we've proved that this is the right way to go, and it's the right way to build software. The discipline that we have to have when people like myself and others have been here for a while we tend to say "yeah, I kind of know what they want." No, we've got to back off of that and say "let's have them prove to us what they want and tell us what they want." That's what the new process is all about, and we're moving through in every area including H.R. on the ABS side. The billing products - we're in a good pattern now of getting our Members involved almost weekly. VERN: I see that from my perspective also, Dan. I remember when we would go into those first sites - Central Indiana, the first site for iVUE. You go in there, you'd be live, and then there would be this mass rush where we would go back. No - the screens didn't kind of flow correctly. The user didn't like them. It was uncomfortable. It was clunky, and we ended up going back and refactoring and redoing alot of those screens. I've got to tell you as you've gone into these beta sites with phase 1 and now phase 2 at United. I've been kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's like "OK we're live." Now comes this absolute flood of "no, we need to change this, we need to do this," and we're really not seeing it. I mean there's always some fine-tuning that we're doing; it's an iterative process. But to me this has really been powerful where we've been able to do it, do it once, do it well, and then move on without having to redo things one, two and three times - huge efficiencies. DAN: Yeah, it makes a big difference to do it upfront. We were out at a Member site using Connect two weeks ago, and we just did a discussion on what we found out there. The biggest thing we found is they want more - they want more Connect features, they want more things in Connect, and that's really what we want. I mean because that's all on our roadmap to get those out there. It's not saying "well, we don't like this." It's more about give us more. And so that's our pressure and that kind of leads us back to our plans that we talked to the Board about. We're getting a lot of interest from both telecoms and utilities and utilities getting into broadband. They want more. And that's what's kind of driving us is to try to hit this window where we can keep our Members satisfied with getting iVUE Connect to them faster. VERN: So, Dan, you know this is the tough time. Right? I mean this is a critical time of the software life cycle. You're working your way through development. We've announced it to the Members. They're anticipating it, and we're kind of in that in-between time where our sales people are saying "do I show the old stuff or do I show the new stuff?" We had Sam Houston, our very first site that went live from a customer service persona on iVUE Connect only; they didn't train their people on the legacy software. That was a milestone, but I'm guessing this puts a little pressure on you and your teams because boy, is there an urgency. Our Members have seen it. They want it. We're starting to develop a backlog of new implementations to Connect. And so this is when the pressure is really on you, and I'm always amazed. I mean you've got such a large group, 300 plus people in research and development, a very diverse group, and you're able to manage multiple projects and multiple initiatives with a very diverse group of employees. What's your biggest challenge in that regard? DAN: Well, you know, so many things going on is the biggest challenge, right? I mean we've got phase 3 things for Telecom - the data center, the call detail processing, while we are still working really hard on some of the things for the utility side - the delinquent role, we're deep into the cashier role now. So we've just got so many balls in the air, and there's so many people involved now. When you first start something like this out, it's kind of small, it's a smaller group, and it's a lot more controllable. But now there's no way we could scale without everybody helping and pitching in. But the project has scaled and is scaling even more. We've got a number of new developers that are getting their feet on the ground so we've got to bring them up to speed also. But just the size of the projects and the people involved from product to implementation - Ed's group. Doug's group is in the support area; they're having two of their people starting to work with QA now so they can learn iVUE Connect and start supporting it, which is great. There's more people to bring in, keep them going, and keep them up to speed and everything. So it's just the magnitude of the project. When we did iVUE years ago, it was the same thing. You start small and at some point we had over 100 people probably working on iVUE, and Connect is going to be even bigger than that. We're a bigger company; we'll probably have double that number when it's all said and done. The other big challenge we have right now is bringing the industries together. When we think about that, there's really nobody in our market t
