What is “Active Beta”?

A Collaborative Beta Project for Credit Union Executives

Tools Currently in Active Beta

• #1210:  Self Directed Data Floods
• #1310:  Library Statistics Dashboard
• #1315:  Why your Members Call
• #1670:  Loan Productivity Analysis Dashboard

How can we get tools to your desk faster, especially tools which are better tested in a real-world environment than in a controlled laboratory?  Even more importantly, how can we tap the wealth of knowledge and experience held by your teams, to help us make better products for all our partner credit unions?

Welcome to Active Beta, our solution to increase speed to market on our most valuable toolkits, while engaging our cooperative Network for real-world testing, feedback, and vision.  For projects in Active Beta, we conduct a minimal amount of basic testing and quality assurance pre-release reducing our development time, getting tools in our Credit Union’s hands much quicker.  You’ll have a period of time to use and value from these dashboards with your live member data, providing comments and recommendations along the way.  Your feedback is much more than glitch reporting.  We rely on you to give us unique insights in how these tools can best integrate into your existing operations, maximizing value to the credit union, and ultimately transforming a tool into a valuable workhorse your teams will WANT to use each day.

What should I do differently when using an Active Beta Feature?

Staying alert, and thinking critically while using an Active Beta feature are both best practices we’d recommend that you implement.  CU*BASE is such a dynamic environment, where each credit union has slightly different vendor relationships, service providers, product and service configurations, and everything else which makes each credit union unique.  It would be virtually impossible to test functionality of each tool using each unique combination of vendor relationships and product and service configurations, effectively increasing our testing costs while reducing effectiveness. Most commonly, we see specific product or vendor compatibility issues being identified during our active beta periods.

Staying alert, and thinking critically of the data presented can help identify these potential short-comings in an active beta feature.  Should you notice any if these situations, or have any other comments or recommendations on an Active Beta tool we want to hear from you.  Please be sure to report all issues, comments, or recommendations you have on our Active Beta features so your feedback is heard and addressed.

How do I provide feedback on tools in Active Beta?

Use the Active Beta Improvement Submission Form to provide Active Beta feedback will ensure that your comments get routed to the Asterisk Intelligence team for research, review, and if needed escalation to programming.  We rely on these comments for the continued improvement on these features, as well as the eventual graduation out of Active Beta status.

Active Beta Improvement Submission Form

How long are tools kept in an Active Beta status?

Our goal is to graduate tools out of Active Beta within 6 months of the original release date.  However, graduation is dictated by confidence and functionality, not an arbitrary amount of time.  We review tool usage statistics on Active Beta features.  If after 6 months, we feel that usage and client feedback has not been sufficient to graduate the tool, additional time and efforts will be taken to increase tool usage and testing initiatives prior to graduating the tool out of Active Beta status.

Want to learn more about Active Beta?  Contact us at AI@cuanswers.com