Whenever that second instance of Clarity came about, it was overwhelming even to people who were accustomed to working with program management tools. There were so many data fields that could potentially be leveraged, so many kinds of internal metrics. They actually brought in an outside consulting team. I can't recall the name of the team, and where they were from. I remember they were from down South. They were actually on-premises for a week or so. Then, they came back periodically just to fine-tune things. I interacted with them on some occasions, as they wanted to pick my brain on how I was leveraging it to track applications and to run high level reporting for management on just basic metrics and also initially on just program management. Overall, I found the tool to be fairly straightforward. That said, for people who did want to create their own reports, whatever instance we had, a lot of people found it difficult, and what they typically ended up doing is getting training. They're very, very smart, certainly smarter than me, where they would come to me as a resource and say, "Hey, you seem to have a knack for this tool. Can you create a report that kind of sort of does this?" I would say, "Sure." Then, I would knock it out and they would say, "Great." Then, they would have a customized report that met their needs, where they could kind of fire at will and run the report whenever they wanted it to. However, many people didn't find it as easy as I did. Many roles that I've had was the role of a financial analyst. There's been a number of sales organizations, sales organizations that I've supported over time. These are organizations that'll have anywhere from a couple hundred to as many as almost several thousand salespeople, the people who support them, et cetera. One of the organizations that I supported was the main sales force. These are like your rank and file sales representatives who go out and just sell equipment, that sells services, et cetera. It's everything from your entry-level sales reps, all the way to your highest-performing sales reps, all the supervisory management, and all the industry VPs and sales VPs, et cetera, right up to the highest levels of the sales organization for the United States. They had a variety of almost competing tools that were used to consolidate their prospects, and with their pipelines, et cetera. Salesforce had already been installed in Europe with great success. There, you have, obviously, different languages, you have different management styles, organizational structures, et cetera, and yet they were able to install and make use of, Salesforce quite successfully. They actually did it fairly quickly. For us, Europe included Eastern Europe, Russia, all of North Africa, and the Middle East - they all installed Salesforce and did so fairly quickly and successfully. However, there was great resistance in North America. The primary reason was that Salesforce was a cloud-based technology. There was tremendous resistance in both the Canadian and the US communities to have anything other than something that was internal inside of our firewall. The Salesforce people were saying, "We work with governments. We work with everything from defense contractors, to military organizations, to intelligence organizations. There's nothing to fear. This is the future." Yet there was tremendous resistance. It wasn't until someone at the highest levels of the corporation said, "We’ve got Europe covered. We got developing markets covered. North America, get together and get on board with Salesforce. That way, we have unified technology worldwide." Meanwhile, I was actually taking these two competing systems, where the sales reps focused on equipment and then secondarily services, as opposed to another sales organization that would focus on services and then would periodically think about selling equipment. There were competing philosophies and their prospects resided in two different systems. What I would do is developed a knack for taking these two data sets, exporting them out of the two systems, smashing them together, removing the overlapping or duplicate records, then being able to present to management, "You have anywhere between an $8 to $9 billion pipeline for the next nine months. Assuming that you close 20% to 25% of your deals, this is what this might be. You're in striking distance of achieving these types kinds of services, signings, or equipment signings." Management got really, really excited about this. Then, what I did after that was that became the basis, the underlying data, that smashed together data, became the data that we ultimately fed into Salesforce. The reason why I'm giving this background is one of the things that Salesforce did that was very, very clever, is allowed just four people to take data and create a shell. What they did is they said, when they were doing the introduction to our team, they said, "There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data fields that are used by our clients all over the globe, but what we're going to do, based upon the data set that you have in the present, we're only going to create this shell or this instance of Salesforce, and we're only going to use 75 data fields." That, to me, was very, very powerful. Even if they were data fields that were using different nomenclature, it was considered a standard naming convention that Salesforce was familiar with. As time went by, we began expanding, making use of a greater and greater quantity of data fields, and being able to slice and dice, if you will, data in greater levels of detail and complexity. It was easier for rank and file, whether you were finance, or information technology people, or salespeople, sales reps, management, whatever, everybody was able to get their heads around a tool that was becoming more and more sophisticated as the months went by as opposed to starting off with saying, "There are 300 possible data fields, and metrics, and calculations, or whatever, but we're only going to use 35 of them, or 50 of them, or whatever." The fact that everybody can see them is very, very intimidating. That was one of the reasons for the pushback in our organization when Clarity was rolled out. People could see all these data fields. Either the implementation wasn't good or the consultants that we were dealing with weren't very thoughtful. However, when people saw all the possible data fields that they had, it was overwhelming. That was consistent feedback that I heard through a variety of channels and there was resistance due to that. If there's any feedback that I would give is that it's one thing to say, "Here are all the possibilities." However, then, when the salespeople marry up with the folks who are going to do the implementation, they need to be able to say, "So what are your immediate needs? Maybe we'll throw some additional data fields in there to kind of spice things up." Then, as time goes by, reveal additional data entry options, either for people who are making the actual entries or what have you. That's something that I observed firsthand. I have seen interfaces that are much hipper, and much more intuitive. The layouts might have a more modern or current touch and feel. With the instance that we had, it seemed like it was just a little outdated. When you were clicking on hypertext links, as opposed to a button. Now, these are nuanced differences, however, having a menu where you'd see a header, underneath the header, you would see a blue font that was a hypertext link. Then, depending on whether you wanted to look at application data, whether you wanted to enter your time, or you wanted to look up specific projects and dig into those projects, into the sub-elements that make up all the different views within a given project, or you wanted to get to a data export function, or whatever, it was all a function of finding your overall category and then find underneath that the appropriate link. I don't know how old that interface was. Maybe it's still like that now, or a bit more modern, however, from my experience, a more modern interface would be a bonus.
