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The government is at an inflection point. The changing nature of warfare, increasing demands of a growing population, and needed investment in infrastructure are pushing budgets to the breaking point. Those who operate within a budget know the necessity of optimizing every dollar towards strategic objectives. This need is leading to a generational shift towards integrated planning across the public sector.
Recognizing the growing need for a platform like Decision Lens, Diversis Capital invested in the company to fast-forward product innovation, expand an already talented customer success team, and make Decision Lens available on more networks. The partnership will allow Decision Lens to accelerate its mission of revolutionizing the decision-making required for great achievement.
For government agencies looking to transform how they prioritize, plan, and fund, the investment in Decision Lens will provide the catalyst to your modernization.
Product Innovation
Since its founding, Decision Lens has delivered cutting-edge capabilities to the public sector month after month and year after year. However, over the last several years as customer adoption of Decision Lens has grown exponentially, so have requests for new features to extend the software further across the planning and budgeting process.
While we have desired to deliver more and deliver faster as a bootstrapped company, we were forced to make tradeoffs with our product roadmap. The investment by Diversis will allow an expansion of the product team so we can continue to develop new features.
We recently spoke to Kevin Connor the Chief Product Officer at Decision Lens, and he specifically highlighted the following ways customers will benefit from the investment:
- Enhancing the social and collaborative capabilities in the app to integrate more fully and comprehensively with the data, analytics and algorithmic frameworks for decision making
- Improving the flow of data and information across the value chain from strategy to implementation up and down the organization
- Providing the tools to turn long range planning objectives into in-year funding decisions which allow for continuous course correction and assuring goals and objectives are met.
Expanding the Customer Success Team
One key to our customers’ success has always been a stellar customer success team. This group of talented individuals is an extension of your team and work with you hand in hand as you become self-sufficient in using Decision Lens.
In as little as 12-weeks, this team takes the time to understand your process, translate that into Decision Lens value, and provide necessary training to ensure adoption and success. This team not only assists in implementation but also remains engaged with you to provide support, partner on training, and serve as your voice within Decision Lens. As adoption of Decision Lens has exploded, so has the need for talented people to support our growing customer base.
The investment in the customer success team will allow Decision Lens to forward invest in new hires, spend more time on training, and ensure every Customer Success Manager (CSM) has enough time to provide the white-glove service our customers have come to expect.
Alison Denton, Chief Operating Officer at Decision Lens, highlights a few areas where customers will see benefits from the investment by Diversis during her discussion on the future of customer success, including:
- Increasing the size of the team to add more new roles and additional skillsets to enable us to get customers faster time to value and better overall support
- Building out Decision Lens University offerings to provide even more ways for customers to learn
- Increasing the speed at which we can accelerate our product development timeline to respond to market requests for new, helpful features
Overall, customers will have the opportunity to continue to work with their current CSM, have access to a broader range of experts to rely on in specific circumstances, and be certain their CSM can provide the stellar service they’ve come to expect.
Platforms
Making commercial off-the-shelf software accessible and available to the public sector requires significant resources. Currently, Decision Lens is available on several hosting environments (including Second Front and AWS GovCloud), meets strict security requirements demanded by the DoD and IC customers, and can be contracted for in a variety of ways.
However, the public sector has many different hosting platforms such as Jupiter (Navy) and Army Resource Cloud (ARC) to name just a few. Meeting the requirements for hosting on these platforms, maintaining software parity across them, and expanding to other platforms requires significant resources.
The investment from Diversis will allow Decision Lens to extend its reach to more platforms and thus make it easier for our customers to purchase and deploy Decision Lens. Additionally, customers will have confidence that software updates will be deployed across the vast array of networks with speed ensuring they always have access to the latest and greatest features.
Decision Lens CTO Siva Nookala, discussed how the investment will improve availability of our software across these many environments:
- Continued investment in DevSecOps to support the multiple (and increasing) hosting platforms on which Decision Lens is available. Investment will ensure a consistent experience for our customers regardless of which hosting platform they choose.
- Enhancing our SaaS cloud by moving beyond our current FedRAMP Moderate certified level to serve customers with additional requirements.
- Invest more in research and development to deliver smarter and more intuitive solutions which offer greater value to our users.
Conclusion
As Decision Lens Co-Founder and CEO John Saaty discussed, Diversis invested in Decision Lens because it believes the government is at a transitional moment and providing more resources to Decision Lens will allow it to meet the moment. The Decision Lens customers have come to know and love will continue to be the Decision Lens customers know and love, but better.
The people our customers, prospects, and partners interact with every day will continue to be the people you interact with every day. In short, the future of Decision Lens is looking brighter than ever. From faster product innovation to investments in customer success, the time is right to partner with Decision Lens to modernize how your agency prioritizes, plans, and funds.
