Blog

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

From Our Team to Yours: Conversation with a Techie

Gone are the days of pushing technology initiatives out to a future date or worse yet, off completely. It’s all about now — what’s happening now (and not happening) in the technology world and how businesses can amplify their processes and deliverables with those technologies. In fact, technology is a key responsibility of every modern-time business.

This is an invitation from our team to yours. Get to know what technology means at Anova and how that connects you to – our prospect, our client, or someone on a quest to learn more about our research programs one step at a time – through an interview with Anova’s tech lead, Jamie Zielinski.

Anova: It is one thing to use technology, but you help build and deploy it. What do you like about technology?

Jamie: What I love about technology is that it is constantly changing. I know that is probably frustrating for most people and certainly a huge responsibility for companies to keep up with, but I love it. It keeps me on my toes, and every day I learn something new. There is a constant evolution happening and technologies are always improving for the better. I love discovering or helping to develop technology that can make our lives easier and our business run more efficiently. That is beyond satisfying.

Anova: How has technology evolved at Anova over the past few years?

Jamie: Technology has helped make Anova more efficient. Years ago, we had many manual processes in place. We knew we needed to streamline our procedures, especially as we grew. We went into a major discovery phase. We thought through our needs as a business as well as through our clients’ needs. That process peaked with the development and launch of Anova’s own proprietary system named Viewpoint. We learned a ton about cloud systems, cybersecurity, frameworks, coding and dashboard creation along the way. Today, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the client experience whether that be modernizing the look and feel of Viewpoint, creating new competitive analysis reports, or updating the code and framework to the latest and greatest versions available.

We are fortunate to work with some talented programmers who turn our ideas into reality. I am excited to continue to work with them to evolve our technology to not only please our clients but also to help our analysts synthesize data even quicker to continue to provide actionable feedback in real-time.

Anova: You mention Viewpoint, can you share more about this technology?

Jamie: Absolutely. Viewpoint is the backbone technology of what we do. The technology meets internal and external needs. It stores, manages, and processes all the data Anova uses for its research. Whether we are conducting win/loss, departed client or client satisfaction projects for a client, we use Viewpoint for every step along the way.

Viewpoint is our interview scheduling system, our survey creation tool, and the database where all of our interview responses are stored. We initially created the system for an internal view of our client programs and expanded it to have an external, client-facing component. We launched myView – the client dashboard which allows our clients to see both quantitative and qualitative data in real-time. We have expanded the reporting on a continual basis, and clients are able to access benchmarking results, competitive intelligence reporting, strengths and weaknesses aggregation, client satisfaction scores, data exports, and much more.

Anova: What are some of your personal favorite apps or services?

Jamie: There are so many! Life is beyond easy nowadays. Within the last week, I have pre-ordered every morning coffee, had my groceries delivered, paid for my parking, tracked my steps, listened to podcasts, and read a book all via apps on my phone. I have an app for everything! But my hands down favorite is Instagram, and it has been for a long time. I enjoy photography and so many contributors take amazing travel and animals photos. I have a weakness for both. It’s great to have a resource you can turn to that instantly puts a smile on your face and brightens your day.