Seeing Vision Come to Reality

If you've been following our Facebook posts over the past few weeks, you know that the national office staff has been deep in the final steps toward implementing our new database system in the national office. While I've been working with this new system for several months, meeting with developers, determining customizations, tweaking details - the rest of the staff had their first real taste of this new technology just before Christmas - a nice little gift for the holidays! This taste included a "Go-To-Meeting" on-line review of the basic features and functionality of NEON.

During the next week, staff were given "homework" assignments that included mock-ups of renewal invoices and new members to create in the new database so they could determine where the glitches are and develop a unanswered questions to use in our live training session schedule for this coming Monday. Also during this time, I tapped a small group of "beta" testers from within our membership to complete a list of basic tasks on the customer side of the system to help us determine final set-up parameters and details with the purpose of making the customer experience easier and more user-friendly. The beta test group returned some excellent, detailed notes that have been a valuable resource as we make decisions about the final system set-up.

Then, yesterday, the national staff spent the entire day reviewing all the notes, comments, questions, concerns that we and the beta group developed in their testing. From this meeting, we produced a set of questions and requests for the NEON team that were sent off last night and a detailed timeline of tasks to complete over the next week as we take the final steps in implementing our new on-line community.

I say on-line community because, for the first time since I became AGEHR's executive director, I believe we finally have the right tools in place to truly achieve that. NEON provides us with so much more then just a database system. It is going open doors to new possibilities and innovations as we take the next steps into our future and continue implementing the New Initiatives plan.

As we were finishing some of our discussions at the staff meeting yesterday, I realized what an accomplishment this is for this small organization. I recall speaking about the importance of a strong on-line presence and robust website solution in my final interview with the board of directors to become executive director. That was in April 2006. It is amazingly gratifying and fulfilling to see that vision come to reality just short of 5 years later.

And we've only just begun....