Stakeholders and Users

The various nonprofits meant that Cisco and Computencer were dealing with a diverse set of stakeholders. A technology company selling to a private sector company might worry about the CIO or someone from the IT department. That was also true in this case, but with the addition of many more layers. A software developer tied the various backends of the different nonprofits into the portal.

Blum said Cisco’s industry solutions manager, Daniel Stewart, played a big role in that coordination. She also tipped her cap to Computacenter principal architect Rudy Beltran, who worked weekends alongside Cisco to train the groups to use the platform.

Ferrini said the project differed from contemporary platforms that center around “organizational structures or bureaucracies.”

“This steals from the field of architecture, and it’s a human-centered design. This project didn’t begin with, ‘I need to deliver services.’ This project began with individuals living the experience of being homeless, and having them tell us what they need, and then we built it,” she said.