This is a blog post by General Manager Yariv Kursh.
Last week, the Innovative team had the pleasure of attending the PLA Conference in Nashville. As the new General Manager of Innovative it was an excellent opportunity for me to learn about public libraries’ challenges and opportunities from those who know them best – our customers. From exhibit booth conversations, formal meetings, and a few shared meals, each meeting gave me a clearer picture of the world you’re facing every day as the center of your communities.
Here are a few of the things that Innovative customers shared with me at PLA:
- Customers are happy to hear us reinforce, in person, that we are continuing to support, sell, and develop the Innovative products you enjoy using today. And very excited to hear that we are finalizing our roadmaps on Polaris Leap, enhancements of Sierra, and other long-awaited developments.
- You’re glad to see that Innovative is now part of the ProQuest family. They have been advancing knowledge for 82 years, since 1938, and have strong relationships with many of you. ProQuest is committed to investing in Innovative and in addition to bringing us more resources and expertise, our goal of supporting our public library customers aligns with their mission to make an impact on libraries.
- You deserve excellence. Our goal is for all our customers and potential customers to be delighted when you interact with Innovative. We know we haven’t always gotten it right. We are evaluating each area of the business and, where it doesn’t align with the experience we want to deliver to you, we are going to make changes to improve that.
- We are also focused on developing and releasing, in the short-term, requested Sierra and Polaris features and functions that bring you immediate value such as extending Polaris Leap capabilities across workflows. We plan to deliver a SaaS platform for public libraries, underpinned by Sierra and Polaris, that will enable you to strengthen engagement with your communities, solve the current challenges with software updates, and improve accessibility. We will share more details in our upcoming webinar in March and during IUG in April.
- Based on the feedback we have received from you, we are focused on product quality and optimizing your experience when you adopt new releases to ensure it’s a positive one.
Thank you for reaching out to introduce yourselves.
Your input and collaboration is essential to helping us develop and deliver the solutions your libraries need, and the experiences your patrons deserve. Some of these changes will be quick, others will take time to get it right. But after taking part in PLA, I am assured we are on the right path – together.
I look forward to continuing these conversations at IUG in April and ALA Annual in June.