Mark DiGirolamo once worked at a major software company but grew frustrated when his projects were repeatedly canceled.
“We were involved in a lot of big strategic programs around transforming big software companies,” DiGirolamo recalled. “Oftentimes in that process it would get canceled before we actually finished and we couldn’t reach the completion of the stated goals of the program, and we realized that was a common problem.”
According to DiGirolamo, the company ”” which he declined to name ”” wound up costing itself money as a result of these cancelations.
“Executives that were investing in these programs weren’t seeing the benefits, they were just seeing the costs,” DiGirolamo said. “We were actually delivering benefits, but there just wasn’t a good way to make sure that the executives and the stakeholders knew it, they didn’t have visibility into it. So that was the idea: how could we help companies better communicate all of the great stuff that a program is achieving back to the people sponsoring it?”
The answer was to turn entrepreneur and develop Shibumi, an app that allows executives to track the many moving parts of their companies and better understand how individual projects and teams are progressing not only toward their own goals, but how they are helping other units achieve theirs.
The name “Shibumi” was sourced from the title of a novel by Trevanian and is a Japanese term, which refers to how simplicity and complexity can co-exist in an object or design resulting in a process of continual improvement and change. DiGirolamo, who holds the title of chief customer officer for this Norwalk-based company, launched Shibumi in 2011 in partnership with two former colleagues at his old job, Ken Pellegrino and Bob Nahmias, Pellegrino is now chief strategy officer while Nahmias is president and CEO.
“What our product does is it allows an organization to define the goals and objectives that they want to achieve, and to be able to measure those in a really quantifiable way,” said DiGirolamo. “So, with Shibumi they’re able to know exactly how well they’re delivering on those goals and objectives they’ve defined, and also better able to identify all of the activity they’re doing as an enterprise in support of those objectives.”
Last month, Shibumi launched a companion app that allows executives to get a holistic view of the entire organization, thus enabling access to the latest updates and metrics across the company to allow for better time management.
“The world is impatient now,” said Kim Lewis, chief delivery officer at Shibumi. “The world has gotten so comfortable with mobility. In your home life you expect to be able to take Netflix on the go. You expect to take whatever you’re doing on the go with you. It should be the same at work, and we’re enabling that now with these new apps.”
“Shibumi Mobile is another way to take advantage of the many solutions Shibumi offers, so we’re excited to provide our clients with another way to make full use of these tools,” Lewis added.
She also stressed that as a cloud-based solution with offices in Norwalk and London and distributed employees all around the world, the company has a “follow the sun” ethos, which pairs well with the mobile application.
“People don’t work nine to five anymore,” Lewis said. “If they’re working outside their normal workday, if they’re at their kids’ soccer practice and they need to respond to something that someone in Australia has flagged for them, the mobile client allows them to do that when they need to.”
