Champions, Records and So Much More Make the Annual USEF Convention A Must Go To Event

Computer Geekdom Hits the USEF and It's About Time

The meeting was then turned over to Justin Provost, Director of I.T. at the USEF. It was Justin who discussed many of the topics that I believe are so important to keep us up-to-date and ahead of the curve.

Later after Justin made his presentation Alan Balch applauded his knowledge, work ethics and professionalism by explaining that he had “provided a seamless transition from New York (its former headquarters) where very few members ever knew what was going on behind the scenes.” Balch noted that “If Justin says it is going to happen it will just happen snap, snap, snap. It’s a pleasure to see so much forward thinking going on.”

Photo credit: Diana DeRosa

So, what was it that Balch was applauding? To begin with Justin talked about the fact that there is presently a joint verification program with the USDF, USEF and USHJA which allows them to “gather information about their owners, their horses and themselves” providing easy access to all that important data. Justin noted that “other affiliates could easily join into this process. It shows us the kind of services we can provide to our members when we work together.”

In addition, he explained the digital document library that the USEF presently has implemented and how that has helped them save money by lessening the paper storage as they store more and more data electronically. He further outlined how this program will save even more money in the future while making it easier and quicker to access the information that the USEF provides to its members.

Justin added, “When people call in and have questions – instead of getting ‘I need to go look that up’ the person who answers the phone can access it from their computer.”

Then Justin went into the IT improvements which are in the works, including a newly designed web site with easier access to the information on the site.

Justin received a laugh from the crowd when he commented, “Our web site is really, really, really awful. We want to make a web site where the whole image appears on the screen (you don’t have to scroll at all). Now you have to scroll and scroll and scroll! We want to make a clean and professional web site.”

Other possibilities that are being looked into for the Web site are “blogging (it worked really well in Aachen), creating a youth portion, and providing videos and other downloadable content. He talked about displaying news items and/or current standings as well as an email service for sending standings to people who want to keep track of their horses but don’t want to go to the web site all the time to get those statistics.”

Justin’s innovative ideas continued as he proposed having a PC Monitor Grant Program for Competitions. He explained that “many competitions don’t have computers (especially the smaller ones) and we would like everyone to send in their data electronically. We can take the old computers (as they get replaced) and some of the basic software and give them to competitions that don’t have them to help them provide better service to their competitions. This also means that they will be able to send their data to us electronically.”

The biggest expense topic that Justin proposed was updating the now eight-year-old phone system for which they have a tough time getting parts. They want to update to a system and a Call Center where 90% of the questions would be answered. Justin explained that now it is more of a round robin getting to the right person and in the process interrupting many staffers train of thoughts and workflow progress. “If we can separate those two out, this will provide better customer service while making the membership processing more efficient,” he commented.

He continued, “We want to make a system where the calls come into a Central Starting Point. They would go to a Call Center Staff who would be able to answer most of the questions because with the online storage they could access all the information necessary to answer most of the questions.”

Justin indicated that they are looking into a Cisco Phone System. “This allows the phone and the PC to interact. Cisco has a strong reputation for virus protection. It interacts with Outlook and Exchange (Mail System). Justin envisions that this updated phone system could ultimately be expanded to allow for online meetings, video conferencing and more. The hope is that its implementation will take place by the end of March or early April 2007.

A bit of a computer geek myself one of the things I was glad to hear was that instead of using a T1 line they plan to upgrade that to a T3 line which means that instead of only 1.5 megabytes per second the T3 will allow 45 megabytes per second, meaning more people can quickly access items they need from the system all at the same time.

All of this news was certainly music to my ears