Outsell’s Digital Transformation
Right before the pandemic hit, our board approved the launch of our technology platform — the cornerstone of our strategy. As the world started to shut down, rather than delay our plans, we decided to accelerate them. By April, we had launched phase one: the enablement of all of our F2F communities in the platform. We’d long been operating on Zoom, but to have a digital “home” for these communities year-round was essential. In addition to bringing our communities online, we moved our analysts and expert network bios there too, so that the “people side” of the platform was all in one place.
From there, we proceeded to bring to the platform over 20 years of research archives from Outsell and three acquisitions. Then, in a subsequent phase of development, we moved all our data online, including 60,000 industry headlines and a database of over 8,000 information industry companies. All this essential data was integrated so that company data — including the headlines — interacted with the research. Clients could begin to review market share, company profiles, and benchmarks; they could also look at patterns of headlines by type of announcement, company, time period, and much more.
At last, a vision I’ve long held and our board and team aspired to achieve was a reality: Outsell’s data, research, analysts and experts, and communities were all interactive and in one place.
Now that the platform is complete, we’ve been migrating all of our clients to it. Over time, internal applications will link into the platform. It will become our operating platform, the place we serve and deliver value to our clients, and where our clients can engage with us to get their most pressing problems solved.
With this transformation, we’ve migrated away from PDF, a format becoming long in the tooth especially for next-generation users. Digestible analysis in HTML form, and soon podcasts or videos, will be the norm. We plan to publish in our platform based on our data that focuses on what clients are used to receiving from us: market analyses, competitive analyses, operating best practices and benchmarks, and analysis of key trends and what’s around the corner that will shape the industry’s future.
If we were 20% offline and 80% digital before the launch, we are now migrating to an environment where we will be 80% online and 20% digital, with F2F meetings, advisory calls with our experts, and Outsell’s Signature Event the very special F2F experiences that remain. I like to think of this as “Service as a Software” — my own play on words for delivering amazing experiences that include digital data and information. It’s an exciting future that affords us ways to expand and scale on our transformation backbone. We envision communities of practice for many classes of users in our industry, a community for aspiring leaders, and so much more.
We were able to get all this done between April 1 (no joke!) and August 10. What would previously have taken years and incurred massive development costs was done by us acting as a systems integrator for pre-existing tools and software solutions that formed the backbone of our architecture. We used Zapnito as the basis for our communities and research but then pushed the envelope on its capabilities to integrate our Filemaker data. Soon we will add Intrado and other off-the-shelf software that we’ve stitched together to create a unique environment. The platform links to Salesforce for permissions, which is where all our fulfillment and subscriptions are managed; Salesforce talks to NetSuite so that when an order is booked it is accepted and approved by finance in NetSuite. All the systems work together.
We moved fast and accomplished a goal that was long overdue. It was something we had attempted in 2015–16, but the tools weren’t evolved enough yet. More than that, I didn’t have the right CTO leading the effort: As with anything, timing is important, but having the right talent is everything.
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