Resultant – Technology, Data, and Digital Transformation Consulting

Data and technology solutions are never really about data or technology but about addressing complex challenges for people. For Resultant, that could mean helping prisons utilize data to align educational opportunities with offenders to best reduce recidivism or working with states and medical providers to understand and combat infant mortality. It could also mean overseeing implementation and organizational change management to ensure every affected employee in a company has the information and support they need to embrace the shift.

No matter the struggle that brings a client to seek expertise, Resultant has made its mark by focusing on the humans facing that challenge. Or, as Resultant Executive Vice President of Professional Services Mike Vance puts it: “Begin and end with the people experiencing the problem. It sounds simple, but it’s a huge shift in an industry where fixing your gaze on a shiny object is all too easy, whether that’s a cloud platform, a dashboard, a data tool, or whatever’s coming down the pike. Those things are intriguing and can be extremely powerful, but they don’t matter until they address the needs of humans.”

Founded in 2008, Resultant started as a dedicated handful of problem solvers who put people first and collaborated with clients toward solutions rather than building solutions for clients. That approach quickly proved its worth, and today you can find Resultant’s nearly 400 employees at work on projects throughout the country.

“We view ourselves as partners in each client’s success,” Vance said. “That means learning everything we can about how they work and where they want to go. It means listening to their people, asking a lot of questions, and becoming deeply invested in the problems we uncover. In that way, we collaborate with our clients to find the solutions that help them leap obstacles and achieve their desired outcomes.

“Yes, we have profoundly talented teams of technical experts, but they’re also good listeners and fearless problem solvers, and those qualities add incredible nuance to how they help clients toward their goals.”

For Resultant, a big part of providing people-focused support is remaining technology agnostic; that way, the company’s experts can truly tailor a solution to each client and its challenges. Certified experts on staff build cloud solutions for clients from any or all of the major platforms, which is still uncommon. The company can support AWS, Azure, and Google cloud solutions or a hybrid cloud solution. That breadth of expertise, paired with a human-centric approach, leads to the best fit for each client, in Resultant’s estimation.

Because Resultant is so focused on people and their challenges, it recognizes that the impact of technology or data initiatives depends on a team’s ability to embrace change. Organizational change management is critical to ensuring that each project reaches its full value through careful preparation, oversight, leadership engagement, and training.

“When your objective is to make life better for teams so they can help their organizations fulfill their strategy,” Vance said, “this kind of attention to how the solution is received and employed becomes essential.”

Vance imagines no end to the push for better ways to utilize data as a decision-making tool: “Everything depends on data-based decision-making, and that requires multiple systems providing data and getting it into consumable shape before anyone can draw insight from it. They need the right data, in the right format, and they need to ask the right questions, which is a surprisingly tricky element.”

For any organization, understanding exactly where it stands today is essential to making resource allocation decisions, calculating risk, or understanding KPIs to get where they want to be. Vance said he’s been in too many rooms where data wasn’t available and conjecture took its place—badly and incompletely. Resultant sits at the strategy table with clients and facilitates the conversations that help organizations reach alignment on key objectives so they can truly work with their data.

The strategy element is an important one for how Resultant has always functioned. Maximum value for any data or technology improvement comes only when it aligns with a client’s teams and its strategy, which in Resultant’s view is what digital transformation is all about. The company views digital transformation as an ongoing culture shift that truly integrates data and technology solutions into a client’s mission to help it achieve its greatest outcomes. Integrating technical and organizational strategies is surprisingly people-focused, Vance said.

It also takes many forms and utilizes a range of partners. Of late, Resultant’s Google practice has seen tremendous growth. Resultant is a leading Google Cloud Platform (GCP) partner and a Chrome reseller. At present, Resultant’s experienced workforce has been awarded more than 50 Google certifications, taking the company to the Google Cloud Premier Partner status level. It is honored to have been designated a 2021 Google for Education deployment partner.

Vance, who formerly served as CIO to The Steak n Shake Company, Vera Bradley, and others, lauds Resultant as the kind of organization he’d always hoped to work with: “When I was a CIO, I was rich in experts who wanted to sell me this service or that service but didn’t have a partner who could bring it all together and really help me fulfill my strategy. I’m glad to be part of a team that is the strategic partner I’d always wanted.”

As the company continues to grow, Vance says its objective is simple.

“We’re hoping to solve more problems for more people in more places,” he said. “One of the great things about approaching this work the way we do is that we’re always trying new things, expanding our expertise, and figuring out new ways to meet problems. As we add expertise, we’ll keep finding ways to make it count for clients.”