On Monday 16th November, we launched our Private Release of LINQ to our Early Adopters. This group is made up of organisations that we have been talking to for many months, bringing them on the LINQ journey with us. Part of being an Early Adopter is getting direct access to the LINQ team in support of early application of LINQ within their organisations, as well as helping to direct what we develop next. We have a huge backlog of capabilities we will be introducing over the coming weeks and months; Early Adopters get to help us make the decision on that development order.
We had out first Early Adopter Programme (EAP) session with Kiwirail this week. It was great to finally see users apply LINQ against real-world scenarios. The insights into your product that you gain from working directly with users are essential to ensure that you are building something which solves problems that organisations have. The Lean Startup mantra of “be in love with the problem, not your solution” becomes real as customer conversations develop.
It was very pleasing therefore to see LINQ, even at this very early release, start to deliver a view of the business which hasn’t been possible before. Paul Shivnan, the GIS and Maximo Manager said that “LINQ and visualising in the LINQ way, takes away the possessiveness around IT and systems. It’s not about “your” system and “your” team, it’s about the information and what it does for the business that is important.” Watching Noel Sevilla, a Business Support Analyst working with Paul quickly learning how to create Information Supply Chains was hugely encouraging for the LINQ team. Receiving direct feedback from Noel about features he would like to see within LINQ even more so.
For Kiwirail, LINQ will enable them to identify applications which may be consolidated, finding and getting rid of overlaps and reducing cost. Identification of their critical information flows will enable them to ensure that priority is given to making these as efficient as effective as possible as well as ensuring adequate redundancy and backup exists to provide the business with an appropriate level of business continuity.
We look forward to continuing our work with Kiwirail and our other Early Adopters as we continue to develop LINQ over the coming months.
You can find out more about LINQ on our YouTube channel, or by getting in touch with us at support@13.210.234.248