Getting what you want - even when it's not in the box

We almost didn’t share this blog post. Contract R&D has been a heavily debated topic in the Koordinates office lately and one we weren’t sure was ready for the public domain. But ultimately the sentiment behind sharing the discussion is the same for doing contract R&D in the first place – enterprise software should be a partnership between customers and vendors. So in the name of sharing, here it is.

Software vendors often provide a number of levers and additional services for organisations to use as they launch new software and transition from a ‘new project’ basis to ‘business as usual’. These range from professional services such as needs analysis and training through to SLA’s for ongoing assurance around business critical services and integrations.

A key lever we discovered early on working with enterprise customers in the data publishing game was contract R&D, which gives customers the ability to get what they want from the product, even if it wasn’t originally ‘in the box.'

Contract R&D in the software world simply means a customer pays the software vendor to develop a specific feature they want, ahead of where it might have otherwise been delivered on the product roadmap. This differs from the process of taking customer feedback through user sessions and support requests to help guide the roadmap, as that tends to be more an aggregated market view (and should be a standard input into any product roadmap) than a specific customer request.

From a customer perspective, contract R&D is a low risk way to bridge any requirement gaps without going down the alternative path of having to live with those gaps or trying to fill them with internal or third party resource and development.

From a vendor perspective, while building a certain feature can be the difference between a customer signing up or not, it often distracts from the longer term strategic roadmap. Taking a purely commercial viewpoint, the development costs can be covered by the contract fee, but developer time is a scarce resource and more often than not the opportunity cost is the most limiting factor.

But as we’ve found at Koordinates, after working with a number of customers in this way (and having some passionate discussion internally), there is a middle ground where both sides win.
In our experience the best contract R&D results come from going through the standard business analysis process at the start, where the business outcome that needs to be achieved is identified with the customer, then broken into the technical components required to deliver the outcome.

The tricky part is then reconciling the components required for the specific outcome a customer wants with the existing strategic roadmap for the product. This is where a bit of dark art comes in. Usually individual technology components can be aggregated up to multiple different features. So while some might be unique to one feature, others can be used as building blocks elsewhere.

Depending on the approach used for building a product, features can be developed in a way that keeps them separate but plumbed together. So when components created during the contract R&D process can be applied to other parts of the roadmap down the track, and the product is built in a way that allows it, the future strategic roadmap gets delivered much faster. As one of our earliest customers, Landcare Research has worked with us on a number of contract R&D projects and found the service critical to achieving their business outcomes.

As Dr David Medyckyj-Scott, RPA Data Stewardship and Online Services, Characterising Land Resources Portfolio, at Landcare Research Manaaki Whenua, puts it, “The ability to fast track features with Koordinates through contract R&D has been critical in our ability to meet operational business requirements and to follow best-practice, such as the use of international metadata standards, when publishing our data.” 

With cloud technology changing the playing field of publishing and sharing data, more organisations are making the transition to new software. For more information about these technology changes and how they relate to your organisation, go to try.koordinates.com.