Introduction
Intro
My hope is that this blog will be helpful, useful and entertaining to its readers. I am starting this blog - the Efficient Forums - at the request of our management team at Efficient Forms as a way of recording my thoughts that they suggest are insightful. In a way, the Efficient Forums helps define what Efficient Forms is about and the direction we are headed. I must admit, however, the ideas and direction come from many inputs from many people I meet and work with.
The only blogger I know is Chris Kasten, our Director of Technical Operations at Efficient Forms. He tells me that I should tell everybody that I collect snails and other really personal stuff like that, but that probably won’t happen with this blog. You will get a glimpse of who I am throughout the posts. It will be apparent that I must be from Minnesota by the Fargo(esque) or Juno(esque) dry nature, my obsession with my work, and my need to talk about the weather (cold out there, eh?).
I won’t really talk about the weather. My blog posts will attempt to be focused around my field of expertise and experiences related to Efficient Forms … specifically, transaction origination, Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVA), the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space, forms space and the technology that brings them all together from me.
I will try to keep away from sales plugs for Efficient Forms, but it may be unavoidable at times. My intent isn’t to sell but to expose people to solutions that may be better then anything else out there. (See … if I was selling, I would have said “solutions that are better” instead of “… may be better,” even though you will find that “are better” is more correct.)
History
For a little more background, I will give you the elevator pitch on what Efficient Forms does, and each post will explore - potentially in detail - how we will change the world.
Efficient Forms is a technology company I founded with my friend, Todd Fenske, and some really smart developers, Doug Birch and Hans Eckelman. It started with the thought that it would be great if we could build a solution like Turbo Tax, except for everything else. And, wouldn’t it even be neat if a guy like me (who is a CPA, which we all know is far from a programmer) could use the software to build dynamic interviews without knowing anything about html or other “l” words like xml. We all looked at each other and said “let’s do it.” The next question Doug asked was, “who will our customer be?” We didn’t know but decided we needed to build our solution independent of the customer. (Of course that never works!)
Rule #1 in MBA courses: you can’t build your company looking for a problem. Except that I never went to MBA school so I missed that lesson, and off we went. Within several months, we stumbled on a worthy problem, and within two years, we became an industry standard automating a complex, niche problem in a very difficult to crack industry -insurance.
Our first product, or CEVA, that we cut our teeth on enabled insurance agents to get contracted through an wholesaler (Master General Agent, Broker General Agent, …) with multiple insurance carriers in about 20 minutes. I will leave later postings to describe our Transaction Origination Platform (TOP) and this specific CEVA solution.
But as a teaser, this first CEVA is truly a Single Entry Multiple Company Interface (SEMCI) that utilizes a single “Turbo Tax” type interview. It populates packages of forms, which can include over 7,000 insurance forms depending on how many carriers an agent selects and how he/she answers the questions. This CEVA was maintained by less then one full-time business analyst, and the solution remains unchallenged in the market today.
For more information, visit www.efficientforms.com and check back here weekly for new posts.