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Posted: Wed, August 23, 2006
Profile: Zipporahby Sali Earls Cardiff based Zipporah develop and implement strategic IT solutions for the public and private sectors. The company's work includes an ebookings product, designed to provide valid online bookings and intelligent workflow to help improve service levels and delivery. Recent customers have included the British Film Institute, the Local eGovernment Standards Body and several local authorities. Scott Burton, Technical Director at Zipporah, told Sali Earls more about the company.
During its consultancy phase, the organisation worked for the Local eGovernment Standards Body providing technical consultancy and helping to develop technical standards and maps. These would benefit all local authorities in their moves towards eGovernment. We also programme managed several ongoing targets for local government including the delivery of the ESCR (Electronic Social care Record) a piece of work that is intended to fit within a wider roadmap for ensuring the safety of children and a vital area in the fight against any repeats of Soham. In addition to this we provided consultancy for London Borough of Bromley, South Somerset District Council and the British Film and Television Archive, ranging from project management to full business process mapping and re-engineering exercises. During the first year of the business we chose to use our mix of technical and business skills to develop products that would be relevant for local authorities and added value to service areas. It was during this time that our product 'ZEBE-D' was developed in order to provide an electronic booking service for local authorities. We began by working with service areas that were being reviewed by local government and through this we were chosen, following a long search and selection process, as the implemented system for the EnCORE National Project for bookings. Since this time we have established ourselves as a key part of the online bookings market for local authorities, with some of our modules becoming the market leaders in their field. We are continuing to develop new booking services and have been working on additional product suites to complement ZEBE-D. We aim to provide a full range of services to both the public and private sector with solutions such as customer interaction system and recruitment systems. What unique products/services does your company provide?
What's been the key to your success? A correct mix of business process and technical understanding can really mean that clients get what they want. Our policy is to work closely with the clients and get a suitable understanding so that we are all talking about the same thing; it allows us to get it right first time and that really pleases our clients. We do very little advertising within the business as our clients will readily tell others they know about what we have done and it just builds from there. I think we were also particularly lucky in that we have been able to hand pick our teams for their mix of skills, because we have maintained steady growth and management we are able to look for those people who are the very best in the areas we want to work in and have had them join the business. I think they see what we are trying to achieve and realise that it's an exciting time and an exciting opportunity. When we started the product build, a vital element was that we would undertake a modular approach to our development that ensured the system was extensible to a very high level. This allows us the sort of flexibility that clients crave but few suppliers really provide. We have ensured that whenever we add functionality it is maintained in such a way that avoids the complications of long overhauls to include it in existing systems. In fact, we have probably exceeded our own flexibility and can now tie our products together into a suite that interacts to provide the full customer and staff management as well as resource and bookings functions. The last thing I would quote would be the organisation skills of my partner. I'm very involved in making sure the product is all it should be for our clients but I don't think we would be as well known and sought after if it wasn't for my partner Emma Powell. She makes sure everything is constantly moving forward and puts a lot of drive into what we do. Every organisation needs someone like that, someone who can make all the ideas and plans become something substantial. What one piece of outside technology has benefited your company most? What I think has become invaluable over time is the use of source control and testing tools for software. When your building large scale projects in a suitable fashion for code reuse, extension and continual development for several different clients, these tools really make a big difference in helping to keep things controlled. The test scripts can be written and re-used to test everything each time you make the changes and the ability to apply source code control really helps as it gives you a roll back position and easy management of code. What one piece of advice would you give to start-up companies in your field? If I could offer another piece of advice it would be to ensure that you have faith in the product you are building and know that the people around you do too. It is amazing how good a salesman anyone with faith in what they deliver can be. Where do you see your company going in the future? One of our bookings modules for the registration service (births, deaths marriage etc) has also started to get some interest from services outside the UK so we hope to start looking at a more international profile over the course of the next few years. Find out more about Zipporah at www.zipporah.co.uk.
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