Kanda’s Impact on a National Government Agency’s Mission

About the Customer

Our customer is a government agency that delivers information to policymakers, military service members, intelligence professionals and first responders providing them with real-time advantages on an operational level.  The agency has an advanced intelligence and data analysis platform that uses satellite and radar imagery to analyze and interpret geographical data as part of the planning and execution of missions.  The customer reached out to Kanda to address various technological challenges within their system.

The Challenges

Challenge 1: Slow response to technological changes Legacy application providers were slow to update, causing delays in addressing new use cases.  Challenge 2: Inconsistent user experience The user experience was outdated and inconsistent.  Challenge 3: Outdated mindset  The organization required a change in their approach to problem-solving by adopting new technologies, such as microservices and reusable components.  Challenge 4. Lack of alignment across teams Multiple teams and integrated components required alignment to prevent delays and bottlenecks. Additionally, effective program management was needed to guide operations to a unified vision. Challenge 5. Disorganized workflow execution and need for continuous improvement To keep track of all work, the project required building a state management application that tracks, analyzes, and identifies what data needs to be transmitted to each service for execution.  In addition, the solution required continuous improvement by learning from mistakes and variability in solving problems.

Why Kanda?

With over 25 years of impeccable reputation and experience with both Fortune 100 companies and innovative startups, Kanda brings domain expertise, commitment to IP protection, a product engineering approach, and cutting-edge technologies like AI/ML. Each project is led by a Kanda Senior Technical Expert who ensures clear communication, risk mitigation, quality control, and expedited time to market.

The Solution

Kanda addressed the challenges with the solutions below. 

• Created a user-friendly system for identifying cases, handling them outside the system, bringing the data back in, and capturing relevant analytics.
• Built an onboarding process and set up auto-approval rules, enabling Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to adjust workflows using analytics and automation for continuous learning and improvement. 
• Shifted the engineers' approach to focus on system analysis, user experience, scalability, and problem-solving.
• Introduced microservices architecture with reusable components to support a variety of use cases.
• Engineers developed a standard component library to ensure a consistent user experience and provided reusable components for diverse scenarios.
• Built a state management application and a transformation engine to facilitate data transmission and workflow execution across services.
• Created an exception process to seamlessly integrate legacy applications into the new system.

• Developed multi-purpose configurable capabilities (the rules-based engine that can be used to support a variety of use cases).

The Team

The Kanda team included a project manager, a technical lead, and front-end, back-end, and DevOps engineers. They collaborated with six other teams responsible for different components of the platform, including mission setup, rules engine development, and service optimization. Over 80 professionals, including SMEs, UX designers, QA engineers, data analysts, program managers, and system analysts, were involved in the project.

The Results

• End-to-end use case support

Kanda developed infrastructure supporting end-to-end workflow processes in collaboration with six dedicated project teams. The steps included: defining the request, establishing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for consistency and quality, developing services for seamless integration, system analysis and recommendations based on key parameters, SME review for human oversight, data mapping to transform outputs for the next service, and completing the workflow to deliver the final output to the requestor, enabling upstream recommendations.

• Integration component development

Kanda built a complex component that other teams were able to quickly configure and integrate into their use cases in less than a day. 

• Improvements to engineering, scalability and agility

Kanda's team provided thought leadership on UX, architecture and data transformation, focusing on designing scalable user experiences and solving complex problems through a consultative approach.