Customer Feedback
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple computer, once said, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." Nothing has made that more visibly true to Emdat then when we implemented our Feedback system. Emdat *is* asking our customers what they want, and for the most part are trying to deliver. That can be a long road, and more ideas will come in while on that road, but we believe it is a road worth traveling.
Emdat is a constantly evolving system. We originally built the system around the ideas of the three founders, who brought in their experience working at various medical institutions. But their experiences were one-sided - coming mostly from a technical background. Steve Palmisano, one of the founders, recognized this early on, and has always kept the User Experience in the foreground of our application development. Almost no piece of any application goes out the door without Steve (and more recently, Rich and his QA staff) designing and analyzing the user experience.
But they can't think of it all. Because of that, we instituted an e-mail address, feedback@emdat.com. If there is anything our software doesn't do, which may be a benefit to your organization or to any other organization, we welcome your suggestions at this address.
To date, Emdat has received hundreds of e-mails at this address. Soon, a major release of InCommand is scheduled to be released, containing many of the suggestions of our user community. After this release, we expect InScribe, InQuiry, and another InCommand release to follow.
Development takes time and effort, and Emdat must, of course, weigh the ideas that are sent to us against current development, the needs of the customer, and the likelihood that a feature will be beneficial to other customers or the system in general. Because of this, some feedback requests get done rather quickly - rolled into a existing release, or one that is currently in development. Most others, however, go onto a feature list, which is reviewed regularly by our development committee. It is not our goal to receive feedback, add them to a list, and have them die there - it is our goal to review the list and choose ideas that should go into a new release.
It takes time to develop a release of software, it is likely any new idea will come in while others are already in development. However, all ideas are welcome, and some we are internally surprised that we hadn't come up with ourselves! Emdat's success depends on the success of it's clients (and it's client's clients). A better product means better productivity for you, and a better solution for us. Emdat is constantly in development, but that isn't stopping us. So despite the words of wisdom above, we're asking you today and everyday: What do you want?
