In the small world of agencies that specialize primarily on digital transformations in healthcare, TBG (The Berndt Group, LTD) is an unusual and proven partner, with an amazing track record helping healthcare systems take their ecosystems to the next level. Specializing in full-scale digital transformations, large web site redesigns, digital operations, and the use of advanced techniques like personalization and CRM integration, TBG works with business leaders and CMOs to get meaningful, sustainable results out of their digital properties.

TBG is the Sitecore (www.sitecore.com) CMS and personalization platform's most sophisticated partner focused on healthcare. We offer an integrated consulting and development practice that strategically addresses acquisitions, consumerism, population health, content strategies, service line marketing, and many other areas in the course of major redesign and replatforming projects. TBG's active clients include www.christushealth.org, www.pennmedicine.org, www.umms.org, www.childrensnational.org, www.nationwidechildrens.org, Southern Illinois Health System, Memorial Health, Shriner's Children's Hospitals, and Hopkins Medicine.

Reach out to contact@berndtgroup.net to get a free consultation about your health system's upcoming digital challenges and opportunities.

CMS/WCM  |  CRM  |  DIGITAL STRATEGY  |  MANAGED SERVICES  | DIGITAL MARKETING  |  SEARCH  |  UX  |  WEB

CMS/WCM

For websites with over a few hundred pages, the labor saving automation and control provided by web content management systems (alternately called CMS or WCM) are a crucial piece of the puzzle—but they harbor two problems. First, selecting a CMS can be difficult because there are hundreds of similar seeming products, not to mention difficult decisions between commercial and Open Source options. Second, real knowledge about how to get the value out of the products is in short supply. Both of these issues are where TBG comes into the picture, and shines.

Since 2002, we’ve been on a nearly 24/7 quest to be the most informed and grounded CMS consultant and developer in the country, evaluating scores of systems and implementing hundreds of sites in varied markets. Focusing on understanding mid-market, enterprise, and Open Source options, TBG has a panoramic perspective of CMS/WCM matched by few firms. As developers, we have hands on experience with more than ten significant systems, and active partnerships with some of the leading vendors.

In our projects, we solve client problems including: 

• CMS/WCM Selection
  Finding the right platform that matches organizational needs, technology, budget, and CMS vendor culture.
  
  
• Platform Return on Investment
  Calculating ROI and making the right arguments for CMS/WCM acquisition and any necessary related operational changes.
  
  
• Digital Development Roadmaps
  Planning operational roadmaps and technical project plans for acquiring and implementing CMS, including multi-site, multi-channel, federated content scenarios.
  
  
• System Usability
  Creating usable back-ends that maximally leverage client staff to get maximally efficient, accurate publishing done—taking full advantage of the automation built into the platforms.
  
  
• CMS Implementation Architecture
  Developing the right, future-proof way to model your site and content in the CMS, so that you get the most out of the product for years to come and aren’t broadsided by the next wave of development à la Responsive Web Design.
  
  
• Implementation & Testing
  TBG implements full builds of even very large CMS projects using our excellent in-house team, and extended resources, using highly structured, QA-perfect processes.
  
  
• Content Migration
  Getting your site content from its previous state (web pages or other CMS) into a new system is a complex matter, with many planning and technical considerations. TBG approaches this with a ton of experience and proprietary methodologies that make this faster and more coherent.
  
  
• Training
  Ultimately CMS rests on strong user adoption—and TBG makes this possible, not only through highly usable implementations, but also through tailored training. We don’t teach how to use the CMS—instead we teach how to manage your particular site(s) in a way that makes sense to users and we focus on key tactical steps, all with strong documentation. 

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CRM

Customer Relations Management (CRM) is one of the communication backbones of the enterprise world and has an increasing roll for healthcare, nonprofit, and some government clients—allowing organizations to organize and leverage data about their constituents and customers. 

Increasingly, as experts in CMS content personalization, TBG’s websites make full use of customer data from CRM systems and their vertical market equivalents (for instance AMS or Association Management Systems for professional associations), often leveraging complex implementations built in Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics.

CRM is not only a factor in CMS implementation (where CRM data is often integrated, used to control access and personalize content, and used to log user behavior in some cases), but also as part of true multi-channel digital strategies, which rely on CRM for automation, tracking, reporting, and decision-making data. 

As experts in digital multi-channel strategy, TBG is invested in making sure our clients make the best use of CRM, and allow their digital products to serve highly targeted, highly strategic goals. We consult and help our clients pick the right systems—and with the help of some strong, highly reliable partners, implement best-of-breed CRM solutions.

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digital strategy

There are the things one doesn’t know, and the things one doesn’t know one doesn’t know. Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered on both fronts.

Wouldn’t it be great to work with a firm who can actually lead your organization to get the most out of your digital investment—while also carefully listening to you and paying attention to your real challenges? A firm with a deep bag of technical tricks and expertise, but that is also concertedly focused on solving your grounded, real-world problems in a thoughtful way—and not just for the short term. In the digital space, for many clients, TBG is resoundingly that firm.

After more than two decades of developing websites—often on the leading edge of practical and theoretical developments and working with clients that face many complex challenges—TBG offers unbeatable perspective in a wide variety of markets, but that is not all.

Our deep multi-sector experience allows for excellent cross-pollination of techniques among industries and types of projects, and we bring a broad understanding of best practices and creativity to each engagement. Your challenges and opportunities benefit from our knowledge, but are always treated respectfully as uniquely worthy of an up-to-date reappraisal of what is possible. 

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managed services

TBG’s relationships with its clients are largely of the long-term variety, and often involve ongoing support for and provisioning of the digital products we develop. One area for this is in the area of managed services, where we will host, monitor, secure, back-up and provide maintenance for large scale website deployments, intranets, applications, and related systems.

Unlike many other firms, we have invested heavily in cutting edge, cloud-based virtual hardware, and are able to provide a variety of solutions for big brand and large organization needs, including full managed virtual hosting. Some of our capabilities include:

• Fully managed, 24/7 accessible high speed Internet hosting that scales
• Complex remote monitoring, intrusion detection, and performance benchmarking
• Multi-tier technical support that covers virtual hardware, connectivity, CMS, and data
• Rapid incident response and strong security
• Geographically spread hosting centers and true cloud deployments (Microsoft Azure)

For many of our clients, the clarity and single point of contact provided by TBG’s managed services and hosting capabilities represent a great value—allowing the team that built the site to have full access to a feature rich, highly supported hosting environment. This helps prevent things from going wrong, and in the rare cases they do, leads to much speedier and clearer resolutions.

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multi-channel digital marketing

Maybe once there was a time when websites and email were alpha and omega of digital channels, but that time has long since passed. 

With complex, overflowing, overlapping options through social media and video channels continuing to grow, mobile apps bursting at the seams, and web TV getting real, you need a strong partner to understand the interactions between these fronts and your core digital marketing strategy. And you need to learn how to grow and adapt—efficiently, and without overextending—your organization.

Some of the areas where TBG works to develop strategies and plans for our clients include:

• Strategies that span multiple channels. Finding the right tool for the right job at the right time, over complex customer engagement patterns.
• Execution of multi-channel campaigns that span websites, landing pages, social sites, emails and paid advertising (SEM).
• Tracking, personalization, and CRM connections between campaigns and publications in various channels—including technical integrations.
• Operations consulting and training to enable small marketing departments to manage—and master—multi-channel digital strategies.

At TBG, we view user experience and brand content as elements that consumers will always encounter through multiple digital channels—and guess what? Consumers don’t give a flying fig if they are on Facebook, a website, looking at your ATM screen, or pulling up a forwarded piece of content on their digital watches. To them, it is all content and all your brand, and the stakes are rising for coherent communications, multi-channel engagement patterns, and consistency of content.

Given a plethora of technologies, vendors, and workflows, TBG can show you how to reach the low-friction, high value engagement with your customers that you need. 

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search

While most users take advantage of site search once and a while, for a growing percentage of users, Internet search isn’t an afterthought, but is rather a central way they get to information. 

As the “browse experience” for large sites becomes increasingly challenging in the mobile space, search will only become more important. While most web developers seem to think of search as an afterthought, at TBG we consider it one of the legs of the table.

That’s why we take the time to understand the fine use cases and nuances of search experience, as well as the underlying theory and technology of search. 

Many TBG sites make robust use of search, including large, multi-site, federated, and content-personalized implementations.

We are no strangers to:

• “Type Ahead”—in all of  its variations
• Faceted search, and integration with metadata
• “Curated Search” where users can determine top results manually
• Permissions-based results
• Multi-platform searching (across multiple CMS products)
• Search log reporting
• Adaptive search, based on user behavior

Ranging from larger enterprise products to integrated products like Coveo/Sitecore to Open Source systems like Lucene, we don’t give search short shrift. Instead, we make search sing!

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user experience

Websites and digital properties live or die by the quality of the experience they deliver—how it fits with the users’ taste, expectations and neurology. TBG’s award winning UX practice is grounded in decades of flexibly wrestling with the web’s thorniest problems—for demanding clients. While we are always relentlessly researching and experimenting with new solutions, our practice is grounded in a depth of experience and understanding of user experience best practices that few firms can match. You won’t find us recommending some flashy new HTML 5 whizamawhat for every page in your site without thinking about how it will play out over thousands of pages—nor will you find us recommending the same old boring stuff as your grandmother’s web firm.

In the era of fully Responsive Web Design, our processes have transformed and sped up a process that was already happening: the convergence of user experience disciplines around common formats and concerns. Building on our long history of intense interdisciplinary review, TBG is increasingly making use of advance HTML prototyping within our efficient structured design processes that are an agile responsive to waterfall. Our processes offer the best of both worlds—structure to provide clarity and focus combined with agile working methods to quickly get to the best results in the most efficient, successful, way possible. Information Architecture, Graphic Design and HTML Production are increasingly converging—if not as disciplines, at least as process steps.

Our UX work is grounded in perceptual psychology and an understanding of user behavior, but also increasingly makes use of fine elements of interaction design—as the web evolves and digital experiences become more human.

The proof is in the pudding—hundreds of beautiful, highly usable sites, awards for usability over the years, longer-than-standard site life spans, and most importantly, very high levels of client and user satisfaction. 

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web operations consulting

TBG doesn’t simply crank out sites and digital properties—we build serious infrastructure that has a life and is carefully tuned to our clients’ operational realities. 

The depth of our thinking about how systems will actually used—and about the resources actually available to realize our proposed strategies—is a key differentiator of our firm.

It is our dedication to our clients, and our long experience of collaboration with our client’s web teams, that has brought us to an unusual level of expertise in the planning, staffing, and managing web operations. 

Today, we not only bring this “special sauce” to the discussions and outcomes in all of our large website projects, but we also are frequently hired as consultants to help organizations tune and upgrade their web operations. 

Some of the areas we specialize in:

• Overall web governance—including high level institutional structure, procedures, and reporting structure.
• Planning multi-stage, sometimes multi-year development roadmaps.
• Correctly sizing teams, and having the right mix of expertise and specific skills.
• Organizing content development efforts, and developing content-centric web team culture.
• Analytics, tracking, ROI calculation, and the repeatable culture of meaningful metrics within the organization.
• Overlaps with other areas, like CMS product selection, CRM strategy, and multi-site strategy.

With eyes-wide-open experience in interactive design and digital marketing spanning back to 1991, TBG provides fresh analysis, grounded observation, and compelling frameworks to think about these issues. Organizations ranging from larger nonprofits to multi-billion-dollar commercial concerns have strongly profited from our work to help them identify next steps and find a clear path to digital efficiency and impressive operational gains. 

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