When I first started my position here at Alinity/Alinity three months ago, I was not very sure at all what a License Management Software was or understood who used it. The term “College” to me meant post-secondary school, and what the heck was a regulatory body? There is license management and association management? What is the difference? These were all brand new terms to me. Not only did I not know what they were, but my whole new position was marketing this product that helps people do these foreign things better. I was trying to learn what our software did before understanding who we were selling it to, which made wondering why things were made a certain way more confusing.

Anyways, things were explained to me, using very technical definitions (every other employee here is a programmer or coder) and I was still slightly confused. I definitely asked Jeff, our president, probably around ten times over, “k wait, again, what is it that we do?” Now that I’ve grasped it, I want to share with you things I know now that I wish I knew at the beginning that would have made my life a little easier! Of course, many of our readers are from Colleges and Associations and know what we do, but for any other “newbs” out there, here is something for you! I explained everything using everyday examples, which definitely helped me learn about this industry, and I also talk about the Colleges and members, and then got into understanding the software.

Regulatory body? I’ve never heard of that…

A regulatory body is government-formed under the terms of a legislative act in the public’s interest. An example of a regulatory body is the College of Registered Dental Hygienists of Alberta (CRDHA). In this example, the regulatory body, which is the College (totally different from a post-secondary school type of college), is where Albertan dental hygienists must have a license in order to keep practicing legally. Professions from LPNs, RNs, optometrists, lawyers, are only some examples of regulated professions. All these professionals are or after applying to a College, will be referred to as members or registrants. The difference between a member and a registrant is that a member can be active or inactive, while a registrant is definitely practicing.

Everyday doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and other government-regulated professions need to apply and then renew their membership to the Regulatory Body (College) mostly annually in order to have permission to keep working. They pay fees, submit documents, proof of exams, continuing competence, transcripts, and proof of certifications for reserved acts/specializations to list a few steps in the process. The reason for Regulatory Bodies to exist is to protect the public. Would you trust your optometrist to take care of your eyes if they hadn’t actually been active in the last five years? Regulatory bodies make sure unlicensed people CAN’T practice. This lets the public not have to learn any specialized knowledge to find out if someone is able to practice. Giving us one less thing to worry about!

When I realized what these regulatory bodies did and how it affected everyday people like me, it all started to click. I even realized that I had friends that were part of regulated professions and had to renew their license every year also. I stopped looking like the confused woman above and became the informed woman in the photo below:

What about professional associations? What are those? From what I have read doing my research of the differenece between associations and regulatory bodies, the difference is not often understood. The difference is that professional associatons serve and protect the members, not the public, like I previously mentioned above about regulatory bodies. 

License Management Software

Now that I understood who our clients and target audience was, I started to understand what our software did. Before, all I knew was we were a “License Management Software.” I kept hearing terms around the office and at stand-up meetings like “web client,” “online renewals,” “continuing competency,” and much more. Again, these words meant nothing to me, but at least now I knew who was using these tools. After tons of questions and answers being exchanged with coworkers, and most importantly a visual demonstration of what our software looked like to our clients, I was back to feeling more confident about this position. Basically, we make the process of the tasks I mentioned above (registration, payments, online renewals, uploading documents, etc.) easier for members, and the process of collecting data more efficient and organized for the staff of the regulatory body. 

Alinity

After knowing what Alinity V5 looked like and functioned as, I started to understand the upgrade to Alinity. The new simpler layout and it’s ability to be opened anywhere with Internet just made so much more sense. There will be much more to come in the near future!