TD Labs: ONRCtoday and the not-so-obvious value of prototypes
This is a TD Labs article. TD (The Datastack) Labs is all about putting ideas out into the world. It is a space for sharing and talking about creativity, concepts, prototypes and designs rather than necessarily just having a focus on polished client-ready products and services.
Coinciding with the RIMS Forum in 2019, I introduced something called ONRCtoday: a reporting solution prototype built here at The Datastack. The ONRCtoday dashboard gave daily insights into the Road Efficiency Group data quality performance metrics for a RAMM database.
It also had a great tagline…
Know your data.
Every. Single. Day.
This was a working prototype that was set up to consume actual RAMM data from a RAMM database environment. The solution stack also utilised the RAMM API, the Microsoft Azure cloud and Power BI.
It was developed first and foremost as an internal side project. The primary idea was to develop the data pipeline and codebase in a simulated project context, to build a reporting solution that leveraged all elements in the solution stack.
In what was a perfect encapsulation of a TD Labs article before the TD Labs concept was put in place, on the original ONRCtoday page it stated that the prototype may “never see the light of day”.
And that is where ONRCtoday remained. An internal side project, never going to market as an official product offering in that particular form.
But what about all the time taken to build it? The late nights in front of a Macbook Pro? The many many litres of coffee consumed?
That is where the title of this article comes into play. Building an actual end-to-end working prototype, in what was effectively a real-world environment, delivered immense R&D value. And when looking at things in a RAMM context, parts of the codebase developed for ONRCtoday helped to enrich our RAMM API framework, one that we still use on our projects today.
There was also the side benefit of it being super fun to build as well.
So the key takeaway is that the value from prototypes is not only realised if the thing ends up as a polished final product. Value can come at many (or possibly all) stages of the process, and it can come in many different shapes and sizes - from lessons learned to the proving or disproving of concepts to vetting ideas to creating components or things that do end up getting deployed in a production capacity.
