A few weeks back, when blogging about Desire2Learn’s new Student Success System retention early warning analytics product, I wrote,
From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)…
I’m going to try to talk to some D2L clients who are actually using this product next week when Phil and I are at D2L FUSION.
And then the other day, describing my overall impressions of the FUSION conference, I wrote,
Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers….On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on….
[T]he point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.
It turns out that analytics is a perfect example the overall problems I described in the latter post: good product vision, serious technical implementation problems that have been understated and probably underestimated, and relatively new technical managers that seem to have some hope of getting the issues straightened out.