itD and the art of making software stick

The customer was a data management company. That is what makes the predicament memorable. According to an itD case study, it could not reliably say how many customers it had. IBM appeared under different names in different repositories. Departments had developed their own habits. Each system contained information; together, the systems produced confusion. A business built around data had acquired a counting problem.

It is an unusually good introduction to itD, the consultancy formerly known as iTalent Digital. The company operates in the space between a tool’s technical capabilities and an organization’s ability to benefit from them. That space can look trivial on a procurement spreadsheet. Inside a large company, it can consume whole working weeks.

01 / The buyer becomes the builder

Renée La Londe founded the company in 2005. Her account of its origin begins on the purchasing side: she wanted consulting firms that combined flexibility with enough technical breadth to handle complicated enterprise assignments. She says the combination proved difficult to find. The resulting company pairs consulting and software engineering with products of its own.

That pairing matters. A consultant repeatedly encounters variations of the same problem. A software company can package the repeated work. itD does both, selling implementation, custom engineering and ongoing managed services alongside SaaS offerings. Its expertise spans cloud delivery, DevOps, analytics, enterprise search, customer communities, accessibility and change management.

For a buyer, the choice is partly about scope. A large systems integrator, a specialist platform agency and an internal engineering team each offer a different answer. itD’s pitch brings several disciplines into one engagement. The practical test is whether the assignment actually needs that combination.

02 / The answer was already in the building

The counting problem required consistent customer identities, integrated reporting and a shared information foundation. itD describes creating a managed service and a Power BI customer dashboard. It reports identifying upwards of $500 million in historical revenue leakage within six weeks. That figure describes leakage identified, rather than proof that the same amount arrived in a bank account. The distinction belongs beside the number.

Here, the failure came before the dashboard. Different departments could not describe the same customer consistently. The transferable move is to agree on what a record means, who maintains it and how it travels. A beautifully presented total remains suspect when the ingredients disagree.

“Customer Satisfaction is the soul of our business.”Renée La Londe / CEO and founder

03 / Stop making customers hunt

A different version of the problem appeared at Microsoft. Summit recordings lived apart from product communities. itD’s published account describes using CommunityConX, powered by SmartConX, to distribute 220 sessions across five communities. An uploading and sharing process that had taken a week or more took four hours. Microsoft subsequently extended cross-community collaboration and English-Spanish translation.

The mechanism is pleasingly practical: place useful material inside the places people already visit. Adoption becomes easier when the customer has fewer errands. This is also a more demanding engineering assignment than simply publishing another page. Permissions, content mapping and ongoing support still have to work.

Esri presented another distribution puzzle. Its community had more than 1,200 boards, and 60 percent of traffic originated outside the United States. Manual copying and language barriers limited the circulation of useful answers. itD supplied sharing capabilities and LanguageConX translation. Its case study reports more than 1,000 posts shared in the first nine months and seven supported languages.

Chris Catania, Esri’s head of community, put the buying criterion plainly: “We needed a good, experienced partner.” The work extended a platform Esri had selected. Existing knowledge became easier to reach without asking every member to learn where everything lived.

04 / Three products, three kinds of friction

SmartConX packages recurring integration work into reusable components. ChaMa looks across projects and programs to show who is affected by organizational change. Fastr.ai brings contextual candidate matching into existing applicant tracking or HR systems. Their common subject is information that exists but is difficult to put to work.

These products sit within a broader delivery business. itD lists partnerships with Khoros, Coveo, Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS, among others. That makes it an implementer and extender of enterprise platforms as well as a software supplier. Customers buy help making an existing technology estate function together.

05 / People are part of the architecture

In July 2026, itD’s AI-readiness argument emphasized data foundations, governance, operating models and customer experience. Its recommendation is to involve the people doing the work in choosing use cases and redesigning processes. Buying a tool leaves those decisions unresolved.

The company describes a culture centered on trust, teamwork and diverse perspectives. La Londe also founded GLAM, which teaches girls ages eight to twelve business, coding and leadership. Inc. included her in its 2024 Female Founders 250.

Its own operations have also faced conflict. In a disputed lawsuit involving former executives and its India operation, a federal court denied itD’s temporary restraining order request in September 2025. A January 2026 order partly granted and partly denied a dismissal motion concerning jurisdiction and service. Those procedural decisions did not establish final liability.

For anyone borrowing from the customer work, start small: pick a handoff, measure its cost in time, name an owner and make the answer accessible inside the workflow. The approach depends on usable information, appropriate access and someone maintaining the connection. When those conditions disappear, even a clever connector has very little to connect.