Introducing Enterprise

When we first started on DevResults in 2009, our goal was to make it easier for projects to manage their work and use their data. Over time, we expanded the scope of our software to support entire USAID Missions, regional programs, and globally-distributed organizations managing portfolios across dozens of countries. Today, our goal is to make software that meets the local and evolving needs of practitioners in the field while also enabling stronger data management practices at HQ. DevResults Enterprise represents our commitment to this complex problem.

What is Enterprise & how does it work?

Quite simply, Enterprise implementations include:

1. One organization-wide "enterprise" site. The enterprise site includes all of the typical bells and whistles of any DevResults site, but it also enables you to create an Indicator Library of organization-wide indicators, while managing data collection workflows for those indicators across the organization.
2. As many project- or country-sites as you want. Each site operates independently of the others, with its own results framework(s), indicators, users, etc. Indicators can be linked to the enterprise site, and users can "publish" this data up to the enterprise site when it makes sense. These sites can also access the enterprise site's Indicator Library to quickly copy down indicator definitions, which can be edited and renamed to fit local needs.

If needed, we can also set up a link between your project-/country-level site and a DevResults site outside of your organization (such as a local USAID Mission's DevResults site).

What are the benefits of enterprise?

Enterprise is really the best of both worlds:

For Project Staff

If you run an individual project, you can use DevResults to manage the elements unique to your site, including your results frameworks, indicators, project activities, etc. You manage your project's day-to-day work, data submission, review, and approval processes and use your own naming conventions.

But you can also easily publish data from your site to the enterprise site with two clicks of a button, without having to do any manual work in Excel or email. You can choose when to publish data to the enterprise site, and you can easily see if you're collecting data in a way that's incompatible with your enterprise site's expectations.

For M&E and HQ Staff

From the enterprise side, you can operationalize coherent M&E standards, including standardized indicator definitions and reporting processes across all projects. Your site will only capture and display the data you care about at the enterprise level, so you don't have to go sifting through hundreds of project-level indicators to find the few you care about. And you can still complete your own data quality review and approval processes on all projects' data.

At the same time, you can define standardized indicators to be copied and used by project sites. You can easily look at any indicator to see which project sites report data for it, and you can see data across all of your projects--even the ones that don't have their own sites. And if this aggregated view is too high-level, you can always drill into a specific project's site to see the more granular data collected at their activity level.

Do I have to have a separate site for EVERY project or country office?

No! You can adopt project or country sites on an on-demand basis. Those who do not need their own site can report directly into the enterprise site.

The beautiful thing about our architecture is that we don't mandate that every enterprise activity be its own site. We know that you have smaller, short-term, or in-progress projects where creating a new site is cost- or time-prohibitive. You can set those projects up as regular activities in the enterprise site and have users log directly into the enterprise site to enter data. DevResults aggregates data across all activities the same, whether they're fed by a separate site or entered directly in the enterprise site, so there's no extra work or calculations required.

I already work with DevResults. Why would I want to consider enterprise?

If you already have a contract with us and it's working great for you--fantastic! But there are some scenarios where it makes sense to consider an enterprise contract:

• New Award: You're using a single DevResults site to manage results across the organization and you recently won a large award. Often, large projects want their own, private DevResults environment for managing their project. You can create this separate site for the new award while still leveraging all the data publication benefits of enterprise, paying only for the new award's site--we'll convert the existing site to enterprise at no additional cost.
• Data Obscurity: For whatever reason (usually security-related), you may want to prevent staff at different projects from seeing the full details of other projects' beneficiaries, staff, work, etc. Each of these projects can be set up as separate sites, and the enterprise site would only show truly organization-wide data.
• Ease of Use/Clarity: If you're managing dozens of projects with their own results frameworks, indicators, etc., a single site will store a tremendous amount of information, which may make it harder for key stakeholders to zero in on the organization-wide elements that matter most. Enterprise architecture keeps the project-level details in project sites while still exposing the organization-wide indicators and data your key stakeholders need at their fingertips.

Where can I get more info?

If you want to dig into some of the new functionality, check out these help pages:

• Publishing Data to Enterprise Sites
• Copying Indicators from the Indicator Library to a Project- or Country-Site
• How Do I Link my Sites for Publication?

If you'd like to learn more about DevResults Enterprise, please reach out to your implementation lead or get in touch with Josh.