Hi, this is Paul Vesely. I’m with Blue Mountain Data Systems. We’ve been in business since 1993. We’ve got 22 staff members and we do systems development, applications and database development, primarily in Oracle and Windows. We do IT networking, investigative support for enforcement casework, document conversion and system administration.
I sometimes get asked the question why should we do business with Blue Mountain, and there are several reasons. One is staff longevity. A lot of our staff members have been with us since as early as 1996, beside myself of course. The other is that the same folks who gather requirements and understand business processes are the developers who are creating the applications and databases to go with it. That’s significant. The third is that we, in all cases, do prototyping. It’s one thing for our customer to, to convey to us a set of requirements. It’s another for the, an individual to actually see how those requirements have been developed in an application.
So before commencing a detailed development of an application, we’ll put together a semi-working prototype, so that users can visualize what it is that they’re going to see in an application. That does two things: it allows the customer to see what it is, a picture of what it is they’re going to get, and once they see it we tend to get numerous additional more detailed requirements out of it. It also helps us in that we’re not going down the path of development and spending money in advance of solidifying the detailed requirements. We find that to bear significant fruit for us.
Through rapid prototyping and the ability for us to assist the customer in defining requirements, detailed requirements, before putting them in the application, our technical staff are able to understand, completely understand, the business knowledge of what the customer is trying to achieve from the application. As a result, once we get into the design and development of the app, we can create it in such a fashion as to be able to update in the future when regulations change, and in our customer agency, regulations change quite frequently.
There are several examples of major applications within our agency that we developed in the mid to late 90’s, and, of course, have updated over time due to improvements and changes in technology, let alone regulations changes, but these are perfect examples of applications that have been in business, in production for a significant amount of time and have weathered the storm, if you will, of significant general regulation changes. One of the methods that we use to do that is we put business rules into the database so that they can easily be changed as time goes on. Another is smaller items, are things like editable pick lists where when we have new program sites and things like that people can, administrators of the application can go ahead and very simply add items to the pick lists. Those are just a couple of, couple of examples of foresight into future development.
One of the more significant events that has occurred over the past several years with our major applications is the notion of taking the agency paperless, so we develop things like web intake functions, where the government can interact with the public and in our case we’re looking, we deal with ERISA plans so in this case plan administrators, so that additional submissions may be made via the Internet and automatically attached to the case record. In addition, internal documents and memoranda as well as letters, outbound letters to plans and participants, etc., are also stored as part of the same record.
I’d invite you to review the materials on the website. Visit our website at bluemt.com and call me personally at 703-502-3416 to discuss the system requirements of your next application. Thank you for your time. Have a great day.
