The Minnesota Star Tribune: Modernizing news publication with AWS

The Minnesota Star Tribune: Modernizing news publication with AWS

Case Study

 

Modernizing news publishing with AWS

The Minnesota Star Tribune

The Minnesota Star Tribune needed to modernize critical technical software and infrastructure for its news publishing and delivery systems.  

Architecture overhaul

The Minnesota Star Tribune, a major news organization, has been publishing content for over 150 years, becoming a critical source of information in its metropolitan area and the state of Minnesota. Over their long life they’ve augmented traditional print media with modern digital formats, including web content, video, podcasts, social media, and digital newsletters.  

When the organization’s new leadership established an ambitious strategy to expand their presence to better serve the state and region, their product and engineering teams knew they needed to modernize their cloud architecture—and that they would benefit from outside expertise. 

After evaluating a number of options, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s technology leadership engaged Solution Design Group (SDG), a Minneapolis-based business and technology consulting firm. They cited SDG’s status as an AWS Advanced Tier Services partner and long history of solving business problems through custom technology solutions as a reason for selecting SDG. 

Using their expertise in Amazon’s AWS cloud technology and project management and execution, SDG collaborated with the Star Tribune’s product and engineering teams to modernize their publishing systems from the ground up, tackling mission-critical architecture, technology, and overall resilience while improving user experience and containing costs.

Replatforming to streamline operations

The initiative required the team to re-architect core platform components, update the technology stack, and use AWS best practices to ensure the platform’s scalability and reliability. While modernizing the system, the team reworked an existing CMS’s API and front-end, originally built on Laravel and PHP, to modern frameworks using NestJS, GraphQL, Next.js, and React. The revamped platform now operates on AWS ECS with MongoDB, and takes advantage of a robust cloud infrastructure to support the customer’s high-demand, real-time news operations. 

The team recommended AWS CloudWatch and DataDog for enhanced observability, incident response, monitoring, and network topology. 

They introduced cache layers with AWS ElastiCache and CloudFront. Moreover, SDG helped set up AWS Security Hub, GuardDuty, and Macie for comprehensive security management, ensuring that the platform met the Star Tribune’s stringent data security and privacy requirements. 

Other major components of this migration and modernization roadmap include: 

  • Replacing a legacy CMS with an event-driven architecture incorporating AWS SQS, SNS, and Lambda functions for real-time data processing.  
  • Migrating legacy user management systems to a third-party system. 
  • Executing a re-purchasing strategy for a classified ad and obituary management system, using a new third-party platform.  
  • Transitioning to a hub-and-spoke architectural model for a cleaner, more secure cloud network. 
  • Incorporating CI/CD standardization and container image scanning to ensure consistent and secure deployment practices. 
  • Revising the integration approach using the Directus configuration management system. 

Collaborating for success

Throughout the modernization and migration, SDG’s team collaborated closely with the Minnesota Star Tribune’s technology, product, business, and editorial staff, working together to align the platform with AWS Well-Architected best practices.  

By using a phased deployment strategy, including a controlled pilot and a limited MVP launch, the team could test new components in a live environment without disrupting existing services. Project and program leaders used weekly readiness sessions, risk mitigation strategies, and a carefully constructed launch plan to launch the initial release of the system on tight timelines with minimal disruption to workflows or user experience. The plan included extensive change management and training sessions to prepare both technical teams and business stakeholders for the new system. 

The modernization has ensured that the Star Tribune’s digital platform is ready to meet current demands and also scale into the future. The shift to containerized, cloud-native solutions has reduced both operational costs and technical debt, while the multi-account AWS environment offers a pathway to expanded cloud usage. Together, AWS, SDG, and the Minnesota Star Tribune have delivered a digital platform that is resilient, scalable, and ready to support an ambitious mission for years to come.

Outcomes

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Improved resilience
Replaced several VM-based solutions to self-healing, containerized solutions running in ECS.
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Improved content delivery and response times for readers
Deployed an upgraded CMS using NestJS and GraphQL running on AWS ECS and cloud-based MongoDB.
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Enhanced maintainability
Modernized legacy PHP applications to mainstream platforms such as React and NodeJS.
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Better observability and incident response capability
Utilized tools like AWS CloudWatch and Datadog.
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Faster response times
Implemented caching technologies such as AWS ElastiCache and CloudFront.
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Streamlined user experience
Launched a new front-end design based on user feedback.
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Contained costs
Purchased reserve instances for RDS databases.
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Reduced risk
Built on state-of-the-art AWS solutions rather than homegrown code.

Holmes Corporation: Customizing education and certification with Machine Learning

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.

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HealthPartners: Transforming Healthcare Operations

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.

 

 

HP case study third image

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

Learn more about HealthPartners. 

Reducing global methane emissions (company confidential)

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.

CATF case study inline image

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

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.

Protolabs: On-demand, Interactive Quoting

Protolabs: On-demand, Interactive Quoting

Case Study

 

On-Demand, interactive quoting

Protolabs

Protolabs, the global leader in rapid digital manufacturing, collaborated with SDG to build its next–generation digital quoting platform with interactive design analysis.   

Challenges

Multi-national scope
Core application integration
Business continuity
Government regulations

SDG Solutions

Platform Architecture
Delivery leadership
Custom Application Build
Knowledge transfer
Integration strategy and execution
When it comes to partnering with a strategic consulting firm few things are more telling than their willingness to help you succeed. From the beginning SDG was an integral part in the architecture vision, commitment to quality and execution we needed to be successful. In a testament to the shared commitment, execution and quality, people outside of our project couldn’t tell where the employee line ended, and the consultant line started. This partnership columnated into one the rarest events on the technical landscape today, a successfully completed digital transformation journey.
Brian Johnson - Director of Enterprise Architecture

Protolabs

Re-imagining the customer experience

Protolabs is the world’s fastest digital manufacturing source of rapid prototyping and on-demand production parts. Its mission is to provide customers with the best possible digital manufacturing experience in the industry.  To do that, the company leverages its robust quoting and ordering system, which not only provides the ability to enter and track an order, but also conduct design analysis to ensure that the part to be manufactured will meet engineering standards.  This software is what drives the speed and agility that customers have come to expect from Protolabs and it’s this commitment to the customer that was at the center of the system redesigns.   

 

Facing increasing customer needs, and competition, Protolabs recognized an opportunity to re-imagine the entire ordering experience for its customers.  In addition to creating a new, more user-centric e-commerce experience, the team wanted to rebuild their other core systems and integrate them into the commerce experience, creating complete connectivity throughout the parts ordering, manufacturing, and fulfillment process.   

Collaborative Innovation

The project was bigger than anything Protolabs had ever embarked on before.  The digital manufacturer quickly determined the need for a knowledgeable and trusted partner to help execute this ambitious plan, and it chose SDG to collaborate with from ideation through implementation. 

Setting the foundation

Integrating all its systems into a unified architecture was the first challenge that needed to be addressed.  To determine the best approach forward, SDG facilitated Kaizan workshops with Protolabs Business and Technology Leaders.  The result was a comprehensive architecture that brought all the systems in its enterprise together to support the immediate vision, but one adaptable enough to handle future versions of the software.  The new architecture also created the need to re-consider tools and SDG conducted multiple tool selection initiatives to help Protolabs choose the tools and technologies that were the best fit for them and their ecosystem.   

Helping where needed

SDG was engaged across many teams during the build phase of the project.  Our technical and delivery consultants collaborated closely with the Protolab’s’ teams to implement best practices and bridge the gap between business needs and IT solutions. We supported the introduction of development and operational tools and proficiencies that accelerated development and improved the overall performance of the system.  Our delivery specialists reinforced the evolution of scrum execution methodology to help teams drive to a common solution and scale the project across multiple platforms, as well as a human centered approach to quality testing practices. 

Guiding the launch

The cut-over strategy was extremely complex due to the global scope of the project, and the number of systems being refactored and integrated.  In addition to the transition of data and customers to the new platform, improvements being made concurrently to the legacy commerce system needed to be incorporated, and the tool and architectural differences in all the systems being brought together needed to be accounted for and reconciled.  SDG was entrusted with the planning of, and leadership over the execution of this critical process, promoting collaboration across all the necessary teams to produce a successful result.

Commitment to on-going success

Protolabs engaged with many methods and tools that were new to the company throughout the implementation.  Our teams collaborated not only to build the software, but to ensure the continuity of knowledge across the Protolabs teams. SDG consultants provided formal, and informal, training and mentoring to Protolabs’ teams and individuals, and helped champion development and delivery best practices across all the teams it worked with. Collaboration was the key to this successful initiative.   

I think one of the biggest values SDG brought was the high level of competence in the consultants, who were ready to roll-up their sleeves and do the work with the development teams. They met the internal teams where they were and helped bring in new ideas and technologies.  They helped us build the competence of our existing teams and left us with a modern software architecture and capable teams who are able to extend the software to meet our business needs for a long time.

Rich Baker - Chief Technology Officer

Protolabs

World-class results

The new platform has increased efficiencies in ordering for customers by giving users the ability to collaborate and adjust their projects in real time, and by bringing all of Protolabs’ services together as a single source for multiple manufacturing capabilities.  This innovative approach and continued commitment to customers earned Protolab’s’ re-imagined digital quoting platform a 2021 Gold LEAP (Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program) Award.   

Going forward, this platform and Protolabs’ employees are well-positioned to support and adapt to the changing needs of its customers, as well as continue to lead the digital manufacturing space. 

I highly value the technical and process competencies of the SDG team. The SDG consultants delivered value and coached our internal teams. Their presence was seamless, supportive, and professional from delivering code to leading teams to setting strategies.  We developed oneness as a team that was rare and valuable.

Dan Barsness - VP, Global Product Management and E-Commerce

Protolabs

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

Images courtesy of Protolabs

Sentera: Improving Outcomes for Growers

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.

A Cloud-Based Self-Service Platform (Company Confidential)

A Cloud-Based Self-Service Platform (Company Confidential)

Case Study

 

A Cloud-Based Self-Service Platform

Global telecommunications firm (company confidential)

A global telecom company envisioned a transformed customer experience. They collaborated with SDG to bring it to life.

Challenges

Legacy systems
Competitive market
Complex integrations
Multiple customer profiles

SDG Solutions

Business architecture
Technical architecture
System implementation
Agile project delivery

Disrupting an industry through transformed customer experience

The communications industry can be difficult for customers to navigate, and customer expectations for digital interactions are at an all-time high. One global telecommunications firm recognized the opportunity to transform the experience of their customers by bringing simplicity to complicated processes and interactions. To do this, they envisioned a world-class self-service digital experience platform for their commercial customers. The company’s leaders imagined a single commercial customer experience that still provided personalized interactions based on the unique mix of products and services each customer deployed.

In addition to an improved user experience, the company required highly performant integrations with a wide variety of legacy systems. While this was challenging enough, the company was also in the midst of a merger. The new solution needed to meet the business and technical needs of not one but two distinct enterprises with different offerings, architectures, processes, brands, and user experiences.

Collaborating to exceed expectations

Through close collaboration, the company and SDG created a self-service digital experience that exceeded both industry and customer expectations. SDG guided the project from planning through implementation.

The project kicked off with SDG and the company co-developing both the business architecture and the technical architecture. The team devised business cases, documented key capabilities, and identified constraints. Most importantly, SDG helped the company focus on the needs of its users.

This collaborative effort resulted in an achievable agile sprint plan with supporting stories, a combined staffing plan for implementation, a target architecture for system implementation, and budget guidance for the duration of the project.

With business and technical architectures in place, the team began implementation, focusing on identity management, provisioning and management processes, and account management tools. At the same tine, SDG consultants partnered with the company on user experience design, initial portal theme implementation, and content production. The team achieved its goal of releasing to pilot users within 6 months, and initial users were thrilled with the product and experience.

Goals for the solution

  • Enable commercial customers to access and manage their cloud environments.
  • Create visibility to real-time usage, performance, and availability monitoring.
  • Replace forms and emails with fully functional self-service online transactions to remain accessible 24×7, 365 days a year.
  • Connect user identities and credentials by integrating dozens of systems.
  • Allow users to fully interact with the system’s capabilities using the device of their choice.
  • Deliver an engaging online experience that customers are delighted to use while reducing the cost of customer care.
  • Provide real-time views of services and information concerning accounts.
  • Equip customers to pay bills, place orders, view order history, change features, and upgrade services quickly and easily.
  • Supply users with online training, user guides, and system documentation.
  • Increase revenue by creating customer visibility to intelligent upsell and cross-sell opportunities for companion products and services.
  • Improve processes and reduce time required for pricing, configuration, and provisioning.

SDG consultants played a variety of roles

 

  • Agile project delivery and management
  • Solution architecture and business analysis
  • Fully responsive user experience development
  • Identity management, authentication, and provisioning
  • System architecture and application development
  • Enterprise integration and data readiness
  • Quality assurance management and test execution
  • Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
  • Documentation and training

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.

Image courtesy of Unsplash.

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

Yale University: Ivy League Portal Product

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)

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.

Customizing the Travel Portal Experience (Company Confidential)

Customizing the Travel Portal Experience (Company Confidential)

Case Study

 

Customizing the Travel Portal Experience

Global travel management firm (company confidential)

A firm specializing in global travel management worked with SDG on a new portal experience for business travelers.

Challenges

100,000+ independent websites
Multi-lingual support
Deep customization requirements
Integrations

 

SDG Solutions

Project delivery
Solution architecture
Application development
DevOps & Infrastructure

 

A global travel management firm overhauls its digital portal

A global business travel management company maintained an online portal that served over two million active travelers and travel arrangers. This portal was critical to the company’s operations, as it enabled important services like travel management, traveler care, and meetings and events.

This portal, which the company implemented years prior, was overdue for an update. The technology was limited in its ability to customize and personalize content for customers with contextually relevant information. Even minor changes were expensive and time consuming. Moreover, the company felt its relationship with its portal vendor was cumbersome, and they needed more control over a responsive development environment that could address their future vision and serve their customers better.

The vision

The company collaborated with SDG to define a portal that would:

  • Allow them to customize and personalize content.
  • Bring more control in-house, rather than using a vendor for updates.
  • Have one easy login for users.
  • Provide a world-class experience for travelers and bookers.
  • Support 16 languages.

Building the solution together

To realize this vision and tackle these challenges, the company engaged SDG, whose portal expertise helped them make sound decisions about their new portal. In the old environment, updating content and adding features was expensive and slow. SDG implemented an architecture to simplify changes, reduce long-term maintenance costs, and deliver a more consistent branded experience while still allowing customization. The new solution was able to integrate data from diverse sources, allow fine-grained control over permissions and organizational hierarchy, and offer  flexible templating to support thousands of discrete customer sites.

Solution features

  • Manages the client/sub-unit hierarchy with organizations and site templates.
  • Enables rapid deployment of content and functional changes across all sites.
  • Allows selective propagation of content by a client to their sub-units.
  • Customizes content and functionality through roles and permissions for both the sub-unit and individuals.
  • Includes custom portlets that integrate with trip and hotel data sources.

Roles played by SDG

  • Agile project delivery and management
  • Solution architecture
  • Business analysis
  • Enterprise architecture
  • Application development
  • Infrastructure and DevOps support
  • Documentation and training

Technologies used

  • Liferay DXP
  • Java
  • Hibernate
  • Maven
  • Tomcat
  • MySQL
  • ElasticSearch
  • HTML5
  • Javascript
  • React/Redux
  • Docker

The result: a single environment serving 140,000 websites

The company now hosts its portal platform internally, integrating the core platform with data from a variety of sources. This single environment serves over 140,000 websites in 16 languages. The company has also used this environment to launch a second brand on a second virtual instance, leveraging much of the custom code and infrastructure from the original implementation. They continue to help their customers lower travel costs and help make the art of travel and travel booking easier for their clients.

 

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 images courtesy of Unsplash.

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

Star Tribune: Agile Transformation for a Digital News Organization

Star Tribune: Agile Transformation for a Digital News Organization

Case Study

 

Agile Transformation for a Digital News Organization

Star Tribune

Minneapolis’s Star Tribune newspaper worked with SDG to implement agile practices and roles.

Challenges

Legacy brand
Struggling industry
Leadership alignment

SDG Solutions

Product strategy
Agile coaching
Product team organizational design

A major daily newspaper company transforms to tackle new challenges

The Minneapolis Tribune published its first newspaper on May 25, 1867, just a few months after Minneapolis received its city charter. For well over a century, the Tribune and its competitor and then sister paper, the Minneapolis Star, prospered. By the 1990s, the Minneapolis Star Tribune was one of the leading daily newspapers in the USA.

In the mid-1990’s Star Tribune transitioned into a modern-day, technology-driven media company. In 1996 the company launched an online edition, eventually adding a mobile site and smartphone apps. These digital properties enabled Star Tribune to build on its strengths of delivering the news when and how readers wanted. 

But in the 21st century, new challenges emerged. The news industry’s financial fortunes and subscriber base have steadily declined, and website audience traffic, after some years of growth, has leveled off.

Star Tribune’s leadership realized that to compete in this challenging industry, they needed to transform their technology and product processes to a more agile model. And in 2019, they engaged SDG to help.

Guiding an agile journey

SDG began by assessing how the Star Tribune digital organization planned and delivered software. The goal: to better understand their agile maturity and improve their product planning and delivery processes. Through close collaboration with Star Tribune’s leadership and operational staff, SDG identified opportunities to improve and partnered to implement agile process that aligned with Star Tribune’s organizational goals.

They implemented the Scrum framework, working with Star Tribune leadership on foundational tenets. As a part of this implementation, Star Tribune introduced roles of product owners and Scrum master and defined products and aligned them to the newly established roles and cross-functional teams.

SDG coached the employees of Star Tribune during this transformation. Workshops included an overview of agile, Scrum basics, agile estimation techniques, story creation, and story mapping. They paired this work on agile with the continual maturation of Star Tribune’s DevOps processes.

To ensure alignment and focus on technical excellence, SDG’s agile coach worked closely with the teams to establish agile ceremonies, including weekly planning sessions, two-week sprints, and reviews and retrospectives. The retrospectives proved especially valuable, serving as a forum for the team to share feedback and strenghten their working relationships — and ultimately the quality of their products. Many people in the organization had not worked together closely before, so this was a significant shift in how Star Tribune’s software was built.

After the initial project, SDG remained engaged with Star Tribune to support a successful transition and ensure they’re meeting their product goals and fulfilling their important mission. SDG continues to consult with Star Tribune leadership on their agile transformation, and the organization’s advertisers and audience are seeing the results.

Benefits of the transformation

  • Acceleration of software delivery
  • Greater adaptability to changing market priorities
  • Increased productivity 
  • Enhanced software quality
  • Improved team morale

    SDG roles

    • Process analysis and consulting
    • Product strategy
    • Agile coach
    • Scrum master
    • Documentation and training

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

        Header image courtesy of Unsplash

        Second Harvest Heartland: Mapping Food Insecurity with Big Data

        Second Harvest Heartland: Mapping Food Insecurity with Big Data

        Case Study

         

        Mapping Food Insecurity with Big Data

        Second Harvest Heartland

        A leading food bank worked with SDG to use data on hunger to build interactive maps to track food insecurity.

        Challenges

        Non-profit dynamics
        Disparate data sources
        Challenging visualizations

        SDG Solutions

        Technical design
        Data visualization
        User experience design

        Attacking hunger through sophisticated data visualization

        Second Harvest Heartland is one of the nation’s largest, most efficient, and most innovative food banks. In a typical year, the organization collects, stores, and distributes over 80 million pounds of food to an estimated 530,000 people in 41 counties in Minnesota and 18 counties in western Wisconsin.

        Second Harvest’s mission is to end hunger through community partnerships. They achieve this by focusing on results, innovation, and thought leadership. They find new sources of food and deliver it to over 1,000 food shelves, pantries, and other agency partner programs that in turn distribute this food to hundreds of thousands of families.

        One way Second Harvest achieves this mission is through educating community leaders and legislators about food insecurity levels and associated demographics in their areas. They use complex demographic and geographic data to tell this story, but this raw data only paints a partial picture and it’s often difficult to visualize. They needed a more engaging and effective experience to communicate this information.

        An interactive solution to tracking hunger

        Second Harvest partnered with SDG to conceive, design, and implement an interactive map that allows users to navigate their service area and visually highlight hunger need areas. The map helps Second Harvest represent and understand hunger needs more accurately, and communicate with stakeholders to enact change and generate funding for more outreach.

        An interactive experience compatible with any device

        After collaborating with Second Harvest to envision and research the solution, SDG developed an interactive map that both looks and functions well across any device. This responsive web application is able to recognize, organize, and scale its display to the device of the user.

        The interactive map is a single-page application, where all of the code needed for the page to function is loaded once. As the zoom level, demographic filters, and other data are adjusted, the interactive map dynamically communicates with the backend data and automatically redraws itself. This user interaction is seamless and fluid providing a fast and delightful user experience.

        User controlled, powerful, and information-rich

        The data in the application is detailed enough to display hunger needs by census tract, or clusters of about 8,000 people, which allows the user to efficiently view hunger need hot-spots within a community.

        Additional user-controlled data layers provide useful information on items such as food shelf locations, the amount of food distributed at each location, Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) locations, school locations, students receiving free or reduced meals, and poverty rates. The application is a major step forward in communicating targeted food insecurity data across a population.

        Partnership scorecard

        The interactive hunger map helps Second Harvest execute its mission of attacking hunger in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.

        Pounds of food annually

        Counties mapped

        People served

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

        Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

        AsseTrac: Reducing Environmental Impact with IoT

        AsseTrac: Reducing Environmental Impact with IoT

        Case Study

        Reducing Environmental Impact with IOT

        AsseTrac

        AsseTrac partnered with SDG on an integrated hardware and software solution for tracking and reporting on construction equipment — while reducing environmental impact.

        Challenges

        Software-hardware integration
        Startup challenges
        Tight timelines

        SDG Solutions

        Product strategy
        Internet of Things (IoT)
        Cloud architecture
        Mobile applications
        Experience design
        Application development

        Tracking construction assets in the vast wilderness

        AsseTrac helps its customers manage thousands of heavy equipment assets on construction and other worksites that may span hundreds of miles, often in remote, environmentally sensitive locations. They do this through tracking technology that provides precise location and other data to worksite personnel. A startup founded by two Minnesota natives with over 40 years of experience in the construction industry, AsseTrac was formed when its founders recognized the value of replacing inaccurate manual processes with tightly integrated software to locate equipment and bill for the movement of the assets.

        Originally, the AsseTrac team was tempted to use pre-built tracking software from their device manufacturing partners to manage these valuable assets. However, as they built their business, AsseTrac’s founders quickly identified that a more customized solution engineered as professional-grade software would better serve their needs and differentiate their product.

        With that in mind they turned to SDG for assistance in defining the product, designing the integrated hardware and software experience, building the software, and ultimately delivering the solution.

        Built for the construction industry

        An example of the assets that AsseTrac manages are Access Mats, large mats that form temporary roads for heavy equipment in remote locations. The mats enable firms to move equipment through areas like wetlands and forests without permanently altering the landscape. Access Mats and machinery are fitted with patent pending technology to provide the current location of the mat to personnel, who use software to then make decisions about repairs and movements.

        It’s critical that the entire system functions flawlessly, even in harsh conditions. SDG worked closely with AsseTrac’s leaders and the users of the software to design and build a comprehensive solution that embrace the realities of this industry through user focused design and configurable business rules.

        Startup dynamics

        As a startup, AsseTrac is laser-focused on delivering maximum value for its owners’ investment and on developing a product that solved customers’ immediate needs while being set up for long-term potential. With this in mind, they needed the ability to start small but then grow the infrastructure as more customers and assets are acquired. SDG designed a solution that maximized value out of the gate, while able to scale as the company grew.

        Agility through the cloud

        SDG designed a cloud-native approach for AsseTrac’s product, leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud provider. Through the use of capabilities such as Lambda and GraphQL, SDG was able to greatly reduce the development time and simplify long-term management of the software. In addition to that agility, the ability to scale the solution as the customer base grows better supports the financial model of a startup like AsseTrac.

        From brand to deployment

        While building its product and its technical infrastructure, AsseTrac needed to establish a brand, serve their customers, and produce technology that can expand with the business. SDG’s product experts helped AsseTrac establish a brand identity and a design system for the product, build the cloud-native solution, and transition the support of the system to a managed services provider.

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

        Header photograph courtesy of Unsplash. Other photography provided by AsseTrac.

        Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: Preserving Ancient Manuscripts

        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

                  Unisys: A Multi-Tenant Business Services Aggregator

                  Case Study

                  A Multi-Tenant Business Services Aggregator

                  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.

                  Company confidential: Expanding patient-first software

                  Company confidential: Expanding patient-first software

                  Case Study

                   

                  Expanding patient-first software

                  Customer confidential

                  SDG worked with a Fortune 500 healthcare supply company to craft a product strategy for their high-growth practice management software business.

                  Challenges

                  Diverse customer personas
                  Competitive market
                  Complex integrations

                  SDG Solutions

                  Product strategy
                  Roadmapping & prioritization
                  Vision & value proposition
                  Product team organizational design

                  A distributor of healthcare supplies becomes a software product company

                  Our customer is one of the world’s leading suppliers of healthcare supplies and equipment – and, increasingly, software. Starting as a distributor of supplies to providers for  the operation of their practices, they have also become a sophisticated modern software company that offers comprehensive solutions designed to help healthcare practice owners and administrators manage every aspect of their businesses.

                  Recognizing the importance of its software business to its growth strategy, our customer turned to SDG and its product experts to help them define a product strategy, build a roadmap to win a competitive market, and strengthen its product mindset.

                  SDG’s product experts worked with them to:
                   

                  • Analyze software product team processes and structure
                  • Introduce models for discovering product opportunities
                  • Define personas for healthcare practice customers and other key users
                  • Conduct Workshops to align teams and prioritize opportunities
                  • Coach product leaders on frameworks and methods
                  • Produce a product playbook and other materials to guide their long-term product development

                  A series of workshops

                  SDG’s product experts worked with the customer software product development team to devise and deliver a series of custom workshop sessions. The workshops enabled the team to:

                   

                  • Clarify product goals
                  • Craft an inspiring product vision
                  • Identify the needs of their customers
                  • Establish priorities and a sequence for delivery
                  • Build an enduring product strategy

                  Focus on the provider office

                  We helped design software practices around business and customer outcomes. Together, the SDG and customer team distilled these insights into clear priorities designed around the needs of the healthcare office:

                   

                  • Connected
                  • Intuitive
                  • Work Smarter
                  • Unrivaled Support
                  • Superior Patient Experience

                  Partnership built on trust

                  SDG used a full complement of product skills throughout this partnership. Expertise we applied included: 

                  • User experience analysis
                  • Product strategy
                  • Customer research
                  • Workshop facilitation (including remote workshops during a pandemic)
                  • Defining value proposition
                  • Paper prototypes and sketching
                  • Prioritization

                   

                  The result? Products driving growth

                  This new cloud-based software solution is now in use by provider offices across the nation, where it’s helping their customers build efficient, patient-centered practices — and helping our customer achieve new levels of service and growth.

                   

                   

                  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.

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

                  Cargill: Commodities trading, in the cloud

                  Cargill: Commodities trading, in the cloud

                  Case Study

                   

                  Commodities Trading, in the Cloud

                  Cargill

                  Agriculture giant Cargill partnered with SDG to reinvent its global agricultural commodities risk trading platform from the ground up — and from the Cloud down.

                  Challenges

                  Multi-national scope
                  Multiple legacy applications
                  High financial stakes
                  Heavily regulated industry

                    SDG Solutions

                    AWS Cloud-hybrid Architecture
                    Agile coaching
                    Technology Delivery
                    App modernization
                    Application development

                      Managing risk in global agriculture

                      Cargill Corporation is the world’s leading supplier of products and services to the global agriculture industry. Risk management across commodities, industries, and geographies is one of Cargill’s critical business units, and Cargill maintains a portfolio of applications and infrastructure to enable this complex business. Every day, agricultural producers, investors, and regulators in countries across the globe use Cargill’s tools and data to make high-stakes financial decisions.

                      Facing a competitive market and aggressive goals, Cargill Risk Management needed to transform their trading platform to a cloud first, modern technology platform. SDG worked alongside Cargill to design and implement a solution that improved the overall quality of market and performance data, reduced administrative costs, and increased usability and reduced errors through a modern, mobile-friendly user interface.

                        Building the solution together

                        In implementing the solution, SDG partnered with Cargill to redesign Cargill Risk Management’s fundamental approach to technology initiatives.

                        The first step in a cloud technology strategy

                        The biggest technical challenge: migrating from Cargill’s legacy infrastructure to an AWS cloud-based platform that would unify Cargill’s applications and data, without sacrificing productivity and performance.

                        Cargill had considerable in-house expertise on this opportunity, and they had even already built a rough proof-of-concept. But to turn that expertise and conceptual work into the company’s first production-ready cloud app, Cargill engaged SDG. Together, SDG’s consultants and Cargill’s technology team designed a comprehensive cloud adoption strategy, with risk management applications positioned as one of the first solutions in an enterprise-wide app modernization strategy.

                        A platform for growth

                        The AWS cloud-hybrid platform that the SDG and Cargill team designed is robust enough to handle high volume, globally distributed transactions, while remaining flexible and adaptable to allow the team to rapidly build and deploy new capabilities as their users’ needs evolve.

                        It’s a platform that Cargill is now putting at the heart of its strategic capabilities, where it will help Cargill differentiate from competitors and respond quickly to a changing market.

                        Comprehensive roles

                        SDG oversaw system development and configuration, coordinated deployments, and implemented mature product management and software development practices.

                        SDG consultants partnered with Cargill in the following roles:

                        • Agile project delivery and management
                        • Product and Program management
                        • Design, UX and Prototyping
                        • Enterprise architecture and application development
                        • Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
                        • Digital operations best practices

                        Transforming to agile methods 

                        While building and delivering a sophisticated new technical solution, SDG also worked with Cargill to implement agile, product-driven methods across the enterprise. Agile coaches worked with technology teams and market and business experts to identify gaps in understanding and opportunities to be more productive for the business and satisfying for the teams.  

                        While the transformation is just beginning, Cargill is already working in new ways, with more frequent releases, new integrated team models, and clear, shared understanding of the problem at hand.

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

                        Images courtesy of Unsplash and Cargill

                        New York University: Building the Global Campus

                        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.