CPI OpenFox Innovation & Technology Culture

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

Prototyping and proving concepts are regular exercises at CPI. We love testing the boundaries of new technologies while learning how they can be integrated and add to the value of our solutions. Ideas come to us from all over the organization and from our customers, too. 

We host an annual training week and most years that includes representatives from nearly every CPI customer. This week includes a set of interactive sessions intentionally focused on collaboration between customers and CPI. We talk about our industry’s changing needs, technology’s changing landscape and challenges that face our partners. Engineers are often leading these conversations, but teammates from our project management office and sales organizations are keeping tabs of every thought that comes from these sessions and leading subsequent sessions internally to determine which of these ideas we pursue. 

Many of those conversations give us the ideas that we bring to the design brain-storms and proof-of-concept work, so that innovation is fed by both technical concepts, but also practical application straight from our customers.

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

The quality of work from our engineering teams is always improved through innovation. Some of the best examples of this are found in shared services where one simple idea, carefully crafted and applied, has led to some of CPI’s most impactful solutions. NCISync is a patented solution for keeping in-state law enforcement data fully up to date with the FBI’s national data systems. This solution has an amazing track record of solving some of the more challenging needs that our customers have while having a near-flawless internal quality score. Our test automation strategy took an innovative approach to addressing an incredibly complex combination of features in CPI’s computerized criminal history solution.

Each of our customers have various workflows and legal requirements when it comes to records management and the ways that each state’s laws are applied. Being able to test a single application with hundreds of feature variations has facilitated a significant improvement in the overall quality of the solution by enabling much more frequent regression testing and identifying issues even in the most obscure configured implementation.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?

Sessions focused on innovation seem to attract the most attention and positivity from our engineering teams. Almost every engineer I have ever worked with has had a stronger affinity to solving new problems with new technology compared to resolving the same issues over and over caused by an outdated tech stack. Innovation and fresh thinking fosters growth. 

Innovation and new technology puts everyone on a level playing field where, often, even subject matter experts and technology aficionados are starting from scratch just like a new hire or a junior developer. An even playing field really draws each individual’s competitive nature out and highlights aptitude, which is, in my opinion, the most important attribute that any engineer can have.

Innovation allows for wild ideas that completely disregard the traditional walls of “the box” and even thrives in failure because everything is new and, therefore, every path has a lesson to be learned. Culturally, this breeds excitement in every level of our organization from the individual junior engineer all the way to the owners of our company, who are all engineers too and absolutely love to see our latest ideas come to life.