Strategic IT Assistance
Most IT departments find themselves busy with last year’s commitments to finish off projects, ongoing maintenance of mission critical projects, and then new requests come in. These new requests may represent shadow IT projects that end users have initiated or major new initiatives such as the use of cloud services.
The basic problem is that you have a finite amount of staff, with specific, constrained available expertise to address the new areas, and limited budget to augment this staff with additional capacity and expertise. How do you know the right amount of money is going to the most productive uses? How do you know you have the right in-house capacity and expertise versus use of outside staff and services?
That’s where we come in.
Our staff has extensive IT experience, ITIL experience and facilitation experience. We can work with your clients to understand their needs, assess the many technology options available, and manage project deployment. We can make sure that security issues are considered early on in a project.
How Do We Help?
The first benefit of working with us is that we listen to your organization’s needs. We have trained facilitators who can lead a management team through their needs and interpret how their needs can be best encapsulated in technology.
Second, today, most software applications have multiple choices available. Do you develop in Java, Javascript, Python, R, SparkR or some other language? How do you take advantage of multi-processing? Each has trade-offs – speed vs. rapid development; local or cloud deployment.
Third, hardware choices exist. Do you deploy in the cloud or on-premise, or in two-step? Sometimes developing in the cloud avoids having to provision hardware? Sometimes, moving the application to the cloud introduces scalability advantages.
Fourth, choices include the cloud, on site, via multi-processing engines such as Hadoop, or specialized databases such as graph or in-memory databases. Generally speaking, vertical scaling (i.e. increasing the hardware capacity) is more expensive that horizontal scaling (i.e. distributing processes across multiple servers). But you need to change your software design to be able to take advantage of horizontal scaling.
Fifth, how fast do you need to produce results? Software development is often more valuable with a prototyping strategy? Once you understand your needs, you can always rewrite rapidly developed code, but the fast code lets users define their needs. Options such as cloud-based server-less data storage my reduce the complexity of development for projects with short time lines.
Sixth, can you reduce your costs by developing with open source software? Or should you pay for support? Or pay a legacy software vendor?
Seventh, how does security help you secure your new application? Most malware sits around
Example Projects
- Identifying whether a shadow technology project needs rewriting.
- Taking costs out of the IT budget by moving an application to the cloud, or moving the cloud based application to an in-house delivery.
- Reengineering links between different software applications by defining APIs for data integration.
- Building an experimental system to permit managers to define their needs more closely.
- Outsourcing an area of information processing.
- Upgrading the skills of in-house developers.
- Introducing agile development to the corporation (e.g. scrum).
- Turning around a failed waterfall project.
- Replacing a mission critical technology.
- Developing an information warehouse strategy.
- Mapping the next steps in developing an omni-channel strategy.
- Developing an A/B testing approach for content strategies.
- Supplier or technology selection.
For more information and questions, please contact Alistair Davidson at 650-868-5588 or email alistair@eclicktick.com , Laura Klemme at 510-304-2032 or email laura@eclicktick.com, or Dave Rader at 650-283-9296 or email dave@eclicktick.com.