ByWater Goals 2015 (Highlights)

by Brendan Gallagher on Jan 13, 2015

Happy New Year from all of us here at ByWater Solutions! As we bring in 2015, we wanted to send you an email to give you a heads up on what our goals as a company and our goals for Koha will be for this year. We always want to be accountable to our partners and this is one of the ways we keep ourselves on track.

Our goals for ByWater included the following:

• Increased verbal follow ups with our customers. Regular calls to check how things are going and what we can do better as a company. We have already started to do this but plan on continuing the practice and increasing the frequency.
• Faster response times and resolutions on outstanding tickets. This is something we are always working on to improve, and we plan on hiring additional support personnel this year to meet our increased demand. We will also be exploring new and innovative ways of working with our customers through the ticketing system so as to increase communication and lower resolution times on issues.
• Develop more innovative ways of communicating with our customers, similar to our town hall meetings. For those of you who have not yet attended a town meeting please do so! It is a great way to voice your concerns and collaborate with us on solutions.
• Create a user-friendly way for our customers (who have the desire to do so) to test and sign off on new features waiting to get into the community.
• Increased server infrastructure so as to deliver more resources to our partners without the need to drastically increase annual costs.
• Re-invest toward research and development rather than sales and marketing so as to make Koha more cutting edge in the ILS arena. We are starting to analyze where we think the ILS will be in 5 years so that we can get ahead of the curve. If any of our partners have thoughts pertaining to this please let us know!

Our goals for Koha include the following:

• Speed Speed Speed. Continue to work on making Koha faster!
• Elastic Search functionality: Implement Elastic Search to improve Koha’s search algorithms and give libraries more options for searching based on their needs. Elastic will allow us to begin to deliver a discovery platform for integrating our libraries many resources into a one-spot indexer and harvester.
• Integration with e-content providers: Implement complete integration services with vendors such as Overdrive, Baker and Taylor, Serials Solutions, Recorded Books and more so that patrons can download content without needing to leave the Koha webpage.
• Improvements to Acquisitions: Including the integration of EDI for invoicing and ordering. This development is already underway but we plan on doing everything we can to test and push this into Koha ASAP.
• Improvements to the fines module: Again, a development that we have already begun to undertake but will take lots of work with the community to test and implement. This will drastically improve reporting functionality for library fines and will provide more granularity.
• Create an international fund raising organization for the generating of funding and a grant writing subcommittee for community developments (The umbrella organization is the Horowhenua Library Trust – the original Koha library). This foundation will take an active role in fundraising for community enhancements as well as for personnel to test and sign off on new developments, greatly lowering the amount of time it takes to get a new feature into Koha. The North America Koha Users Group is also in the process of starting a similar fund raising aspect within the users group, which we are fully committed to helping support and get off the ground.

Thanks, Cheers and Looking forward to an excellent year!
Warm Regards,
Brendan and Nathan