ABOUT AVIDNESS
A desire to advance.
AVIDNESS is a real word: the quality or state of being avid - eagerness, enthusiasm, keen interest. The meaning that best captures the company we want to build is a desire to advance.
There is a common thread
A career-development platform and wrestling software may appear to have little in common. The same can be said of employee self-service, volunteer management, knowledge systems, community applications, and process automation.
The common thread is not the technology. It is a way of approaching problems: see something that could work better, understand the problem, improve the process, build something useful when needed, help people use it, and keep looking for the next opportunity to improve.
FOUNDER & EXPERIENCE
Built at the intersection of people, process and technology
AVIDNESS was founded by David Rice after a career spanning medical laboratory systems, enterprise technology, human capital systems, workforce development, process improvement, project and operational management, and community technology.
His technology career began in medical laboratory systems and expanded into enterprise HR, learning, CRM, procurement, automation, and business platforms. That work has included implementing and operating systems, improving processes, supporting organizational change, and building practical technology for organizations ranging from large enterprises to community programs.
That breadth helped shape the philosophy behind AVIDNESS: technology is not the mission. The goal is to understand what needs to improve, strengthen the process, enable the people involved, and create measurable progress.
Education
Technology is not the mission
AVIDNESS will use software, automation, data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies where they are useful. But using technology is not itself the objective.
Technology should help make something better: better for the person doing the work, better for the person being served, better for the organization, or better for the community. It should expand capability rather than become the purpose unto itself.
Improvement should be disciplined
Continuous improvement is part of how AVIDNESS approaches work. Before changing a system, understand the current state. Define the problem. Look for root causes rather than symptoms. Remove waste and unnecessary variation where practical. Make the change measurable. Then verify that the new state actually performs better.
Those ideas will be familiar to people who work with continuous process improvement, Lean, Six Sigma, or related disciplines. AVIDNESS does not need every customer to speak that vocabulary. We do expect our products and development practices to reflect the discipline behind it.
An umbrella, not a single-purpose brand
Human Capital is the first commercial AVIDNESS product suite, but the company is intended to grow beyond one industry or one kind of application. Individual products and suites can develop identities appropriate to the people they serve while AVIDNESS remains the organization behind them.
Build what earns the right to exist
Not every capability needs to become a product, and not every idea needs to appear on a public roadmap. We can learn, improve, enable, and advance without pretending to know today exactly what AVIDNESS will look like years from now.