IT Consulting Services

Our information-driven solutions are calibrated to not only address the current needs of organizations, but also enable them to return to growth during the business recovery phase.

Workshops

Workshops are a powerful catalyst for forging strong bonds among client stakeholders to facilitate a “go forward” posture. Facilitated interactive sessions, workshops bring client stakeholders and our subject matter experts together for 1-2 days to develop a common understanding of business and technical requirements. A typical session will explore competitive issues, financial considerations, organizational matters, project controls, vision, strategy, objectives, and timeframes. The goal of every workshop is to gain consensus among all stakeholders on the issues and priorities facing your organization.

Requirements Analysis and Validation

Business and technical analysts collect IT system requirements to capture stakeholder needs. In rapidly changing economic and business environments, such requirements have a short collection time and a shorter shelf life. Working in compressed timeframes may cause your analysts to generate incomplete, inaccurate, or incomprehensible requirements that cannot stand up to independent validation. Why take that chance?

Our industry experts can review your system requirements from the perspective of your system owners and stakeholders as well as your delivery and operations teams. Whether you plan to build, buy, adopt, or outsource your solution, you need clear, meaningful, and accurate requirements. Our Requirement Analysis and Validation engagements are individually estimated to provide a fixed price, based on requirements state, scope, complexity, and timeframe.

Current-State Assessment

Knowing where you are today is necessary to planning and achieving your organization’s ideal future state. A current-state assessment for your organization is analogous to a physical exam for an individual planning to run a marathon. In addition to identifying your organization’s health today, this “physical” highlights opportunities for improvement and answers such critical questions as:

• “How ready am I to deliver on business requirements and respond to technical requirements?”
• “Will I be able to accommodate dependencies and manage people, processes, and technologies in a manner that satisfies requirements?”

A comprehensive current-state Assessment combines on-site and off-site components and consists of a series of stakeholder interviews, written collateral reviews, and analyst and vendor research, gap analysis, and on-site observations. Ultimately, a current-state assessment identifies what gaps need closing to achieve your ideal future state. At the completion of an assessment, our team of experts delivers a comprehensive evaluation of your organization’s current state with respect to requirements, best industry practices, or peer behaviors. This written evaluation includes not only our observations and concerns analysis, but also actionable recommendations to remediate such concerns and suggestions for next steps. Current-state assessments are estimated based on requirements scope, complexity, and timeframe.

Strategy Development, Validation, or Refresh

In order for an organization to survive the changes that have already taken place or those yet to happen, it needs to establish how IT can be used to support the current business strategy. Poorly formulated and implemented IT strategy puts an organization at risk of progressive disadvantage. Furthermore, an IT strategy with extravagant claims of competitive advantages often exceeds an organization’s ability to implement it effectively. We understand that an effective IT strategy ensures that IT objectives complement business needs. Implementable, pragmatic IT strategy is the answer.

We help you build strategies that represent your organization’s scoped, future-state technology visions, including appropriate architecture, and our forward-looking assessment of the likely state of technology. Our expert team will work with you to review and validate an existing strategy or formulate a new one that will ensure practical implementation. Starting with documenting your business vision and following with understanding your principles and preferences with respect to technology risk, existing vendor relationships and likely changes, we develop a comprehensive document that identifies gaps between “as is” and new vision, discusses approved concerns, and makes actionable recommendations.

Architecture Creation, Validation, or Refresh

Every organization has IT architecture, whether formed through careful development, vendor expertise, happenstance, or misadventure. How will your IT architecture express your newly validated, approved stakeholder requirements? Those results will be better or worse, of course, depending on the quality and comprehensiveness of your IT architecture and the skills of your practitioners. Our consulting architects will work with your architecture team to review, validate, and ensure that your architecture and associated processes reflect your goals and respect your business and IT principles. Baroque architecture is intricate, elaborate, and ornate, and all wrong for IT. In a fixed-price engagement, individually scoped, we will ensure that your IT architecture doesn’t remind you of the Palace of Versailles… great in scope, grandeur, and expense, but of little practical day-to-day use.

Roadmap to the Future

Few meaningful organizational changes simply “happen.” The road to a new IT vision can be long, winding, and steep. The waypoints and rest stops are not obvious, yet they must be taken. Why navigate the road to your new IT vision alone? From distinguishing between diamonds and lumps of coal in your IT application asset base via application rationalization, through establishing the culturally appropriate messages, cues, and processes that allow effective IT governance to take hold, our organizational change management experts are ready to guide you.

We will work with you and your team to develop processes that make sense in your organization’s culture and deliver mentorship and training that facilitates positive change. Roadmaps, like human organizations, differ substantially. After individually scoping your roadmap, our experts will make the journey with you. Roadmaps and organizational change management have variable and fixed-price components, depending on your needs.

Business Case Development

For each new IT initiative on the table, your IT team might say, “Show me the money.” Well, a business case must be made first. A necessary part of the money trail is a business case that ties IT investments to their likely returns and explores risks, benefits, and opportunities exploited as well as missed. Your organization may follow a rigorous Total Economic Impact model, track and estimate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), or move forward with a “by gosh, by golly” attitude. Whichever way you operate, our business and technology team, informed by experience and research, will work with you to develop an individual business case, or develop a business case approach and process that can be repeated for each new proposed initiative. Business case development and business case process development are individually scoped offerings that consider your unique constraints and capabilities. These efforts are individually estimated and may contain both variable and fixed-price components.

RFI/RFP Development

When the “make or buy” decision is to buy, and your organization wishes to engage in a bidding process to find the best feature-fit, the lowest credible offer, or follows another selection criterion, we will facilitate that process. The central instrument of the bidding process, your request for proposal (RFP), will contain clear business and technical requirements and be organized and presented to maximize appropriate responses. Based on experience and research, we will ensure that your bidder short list contains vendors that are appropriate, capable, and credible, thus sparing you an avalanche of responses that cost time and money to review and ultimately reject.

RFP development involves a rating instrument, created as a spreadsheet, for scoring vendor performance from a feature, process, and reference standpoint. It also includes the development and elaboration of test cases as clear representations of what each vendor is obliged to demonstrate, using information and examples that your organization deems complete and meaningful. Once the RFP is in play, our experts help you manage the RFP response process, whether reviewing responses for completeness, encouraging tardy respondents, participating in vendor presentations and demonstrations, or visiting vendor references. Each RFP authorship and RFP process management is unique in its timing, skill demand, and scope, and is offered on a fixed-price basis.

Product or Vendor Selection

The RFP responses are in, the demos given, the references checked, and the raw scoring completed. The short list must become shorter still, and we will work with you to review what you’ve seen and heard, negotiate with vendors for price concessions, enhanced support, additional training, and anything else the vendor has not nailed down. Excellent cost-reduction and benefit-increase opportunities are often available during the final stages, and our experts work with you and the vendor to make a deal that works for all parties. Once you and the vendor enter the implementation phase, you can engage our experts to perform independent verification and validation (IVV) of the vendor’s performance, reviewing project plan conformance, module and feature installation and configuration, data quality after migration, training quality and knowledge transfer, and your team’s readiness to “go live”. The variable and dynamic nature of vendor selection and independent verification and validation mean that there may be both variable and fixed-price components of this offering set.

Custom Research

Both large, well-known research and advisory (R&A) firms and small, focused boutique firms publish research on IT products, services, and trends. That kind of research elucidates industry-wide problems to a relatively broad subscribership. Our custom research investigates only your issues and provides the answers and insights you seek, without regard to any other audience or subscribership. Whether you are seeking product comparisons, vendor insights, or a survey of what “best of breed” organizations are doing to succeed with particular processes and technology, we are ready to form an expert research team and deliver the information and insights you seek. Being custom in nature, our research is offered on an individually scoped, fixed-price basis.

Our Technology Domain expertise covers:

• Enterprise Information Management (EIM)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Rich Internet Technologies (RIT)