Your Portal to Another Dimension (of Efficiency): Meet IPD™

Learn about IPD™, how we create custom Integrated Portals that precisely meet your organization's needs while minimizing immediate and ongoing costs.

Integrated Portal Development™ translated: an overview for non-tech types.

Integrated Portal Development™ - or IPD - is a service we offer businesses and organizations that need to streamline the way they manage their workflow and data - fast.

Despite the sci-fi name, there’s zero bending of space-time involved - just some clever building of tech into what’s known as an ‘Integrated Portal.‘

An integrated what-what?

It sounds complex, but it’s all about simplicity. An ‘Integrated Portal’ is just a platform that provides a single, common access point to all your data and processes.

For the user, it’s a way to perform the right processes at the right time, with minimal headache. These processes might include things like assigning tasks to roles within a team and controlling who gets notified of changes and when. On the backend, it’s simply the central place where your organization’s data is stored securely.

Like many tech products, you can get an off-the-shelf Integrated Portal (think SharePoint or Salesforce). Some businesses prefer to do this because these solutions are instant, meaning they get something useful from day one. Unfortunately, like so many plug-n-play, just-add-water style products, they aren’t a great choice for the long term. They aren’t built for each business’s unique needs, they have inherent limitations, and they can lock in high ongoing licensing costs.

Then, there’s the purely custom alternative. This option allows you to create what you want, but it also means you begin with zilch. In other words - it’s a headache waiting to happen.

Integrated Portal Development™ strikes somewhere in the middle, giving you the best of both worlds. At Polymath Labs, we’ll develop a custom, tailored Integrated Portal that precisely meets your organization’s needs while minimizing immediate and ongoing costs. And our accelerated process makes it fast to implement. You get something useful from day one. The product can scale and adapt as your business changes. And the IP always remains yours, so you’re not saying ‘I do’ to decades of licensing dollars.

How we do it.

IPD™ is a custom solution, so it looks slightly different for every partner we work with. But there are four common building blocks:

• We follow the principles of Modern App Development
• We create centralized data repositories with standardized data.

• We create a single, shared identity for each individual user, whatever function they’re performing, across multiple business units.

• We use accelerators: a suite of ready-to-go templates, modules, widgets, and libraries that get us to a working solution faster.

What IPD™ means for you.

Implementing an off-the-shelf Integrated Portal will deliver you some general benefits, namely the ability to create streamlined operations. But at Polymath Labs, we believe if you think it’s worth creating an Integrated Portal, it’s worth doing via IPD™.

Here’s why:

• From day one, you’ll have everything you need to get started – and we’ll provide the tools and accelerators that’ll let you add features as soon as you need them.

• You can integrate data from multiple sources and develop new workflows, all at once.
• You’re not locked into any specific vendor.

• You’ll retain ownership of all the custom code developed – custom code that can be used outside the platform since it’s based on industry standards.

• Your portal libraries come with a perpetual usage license and a subscription model for updates.

IPD™ in action

IPD™ helped the New York Blood Center streamline its operations, bringing together legacy data repositories inherited after a number of mergers with other blood centers. The new Integrated Portal has mitigated risks, with greater data security and an auditable trail, plus time and money saved on data entry, analysis, reporting, and training.

Read more here: Reengineering New York Blood Center's Workflow