Case Study - Creating an Application to Maintain Security, Compliance, and Applications.

Project Overview

BEMO helps small businesses get security and compliant using the power of Microsoft 365. With my extensive expertise in interaction design, they brought me in as a contractor/consultant to help them build out interfaces for their new platform. In order to sell this idea to leadership, I worked with the Director of Product to design inital concepts of the main features inside the platform. He then presented the months of work we initially did to leadership and it was so well received that they green-lighted the project. Since the end of 2023, the Director of Product and I, have been working on providing new views and concepts to the team while the intial framework has been being built by their engineering team.

The Challenge

Today, when small and medium-sized businesses want to grow and thrive, they must overcome the complexities of security, compliance, and IT management. This is unacceptable because they lack the resources and expertise. Externally, BEMO customers (mainly IT roles) lack the experience to maintain security; need insight into business infrastructure; need to conduct business safely and securely; and need to achieve or maintain compliance. Internally, implementation and maintenance of cybersecurity plan is time-consuming and not scalable enough for BEMO to manage. Overall, most pain points and frustrations lie on the customer side, but BEMO can benefit from building a platform where they can manage all the services they offer in one place, for all customers.

Solutions & Goals

BEMO envisions a world where SMBs can easily manage security, compliance, and IT themselves. In order to make this possible, our goal is to enable BEMO customers to manage their own security, compliance, or IT through a comprehensive application or platform.

With a clear direction and a green light to continue on the BEMO Pro App, the Product Director and myself met several times to review solutions and concepts that can be implemented in fairly quick product timeline. Here, he proposed the scope of the features and functionality needed to be in the platform. I took the requirements and designed complete workflows for all of the features, including a design system. The value streams we focused on for our key solutions are:

• Build a learning center to solve "I lack experience."
• Include security, maintenance , and drift notifications to solve "I lack insight."
• Implement cybersecurity package status, secure score improvement list, and drift monitoring to solve "I lack security."
• Implement a Drata integration and compliance notifications to solve "I need compliance."
• Develop tenant switching and include an assortment of security to solve "Cybersecurity plan setup efficiency."

Security Center

The security center feature is a detailed security status overview with visibility into the ability to fully and simply manage and maintain the security for a customer's environment. Here, they can view their in-depth Microsoft Secure & Exposure score, BEMO security package status, SOC status and escalation detail, and vulnerability monitoring.

Compliance Center

The compliance center shows the customer what they have achieved, handle non-conformities, and see how far they are away from other important compliance offerings. This area will help BEMO upsell other compliance offerings and allow customers to have full visibility into compliance tasks needed to get to the next level and what they completed.

Learning Center

The learning center is a future development but has great potential to solve a huge pain point for BEMO customers that lack experience in cybersecurity and compliance. The idea for the learning center is to provide informative courses from BEMO, Microsoft and other providers. The topics will range from begineer to advanced through multiple formats suchs as text, video, and live courses.

My Journey

My journey feature is also another planned for a future release. The idea for the journey area is to show BEMO customers where they are today in terms of compliance and security, and how their needs will evolve as they grow. Here, there will be a growth planner to prepare for future growth by showing full products and services map, detailed service history, service implementation tracker, and a growth planner. This area really focuses on helping the BEMO customer navigate the complexities they should focus on as they grow.

Outcomes and Impacts

My impact in 2023 and 2024 has led to the successful handoff from concept to the frontend and backend build of the platform. As of today, the BEMO App platform is still under development, with a beta version currently released to a select few customers. In the intial version of the platform customers will have access to their cybersecurity, compliance, and user & device management. In future releases, the learning center, my journey, people manager, and app marketplace features will be available. I continue to do work for BEMO from time to time as their preferred UX consultant.