| Our
Clients are companies and government agencies that
have increasing pressure and economic incentive
to accomplish more with fewer resources - a smaller
(and more unstable) human workforce and capital
budget. Increased productivity and efficiency must
be attained across the enterprise. The most common
metric for this assessment is the Return on Investment
(ROI). They must attend to the performance goals
while fulfilling and excelling at their organizational
mission, goals, and objectives. Our Clients are
under a great deal of pressure to perform. They
need systems that will not only make people work
more effectively, they need to replace people! What
once required 100 people should now require 10 or
fewer. Quality and Uniformity of service to their
customers need to be increased to secure customer
loyalty and complete satisfaction. Decisions and
business rules are not just supported by systems,
they are made and executed by systems wherever possible
and practical. Supporting and executing business
rules in this fashion not only liberates the human
workforce to focus on those issues that truly require
human talent, but it also dramatically improves
the uniformity, consistency, quality, speed, efficiency,
manageability, and profitability of the resulting
product. The reporting and analysis tools required
today are directed at monitoring these automated
systems to ensure their correct operation, and alerts
for conditions that are not adequately or appropriately
handled by the current set of systematic business
rules. The systems must be entirely well-behaved,
highly translucent, and easily refinable and extensible.
The decision support systems deployed must provide
highly focused, action oriented "knowledge-at-a-glance"
type products. In short, they must be entirely and
laser-focused on the needs of the Client organization.
Systems
(like people) must collaborate as effectively
as possible in serving the needs of the enterprise.
Information contained in the web-based application
databases must be available to support the needs
of internal data systems (and vice versa). Information
from different departments and even external organizations
(government, associations, and commercial sources)
must be readily integrated to serve the needs
of the Client. The resources required to maintain
these systems must be consistent with cost abatement
pressures that motivated their construction -
they should require very little attention. Additionally,
these systems must be completely transparent via
the systems documentation. The ability to use,
maintain, refine, and enhance every system component
must survive the team that designed, built, and
deployed it.
Our
Clients must know the ROI, organizational issues,
and risks of a project before beginning the project.
Resources must be allocated to those projects
that have the greatest ROI and clearly resolvable
risks first. Today our Clients must chose between
competing opportunities. Careful marshalling of
limited resources is the task of every department
manager today. These systems must be deployable
with short timeframes with tangible results delivered
in very short periods. There is no such thing
as "faith-based" systems development
- it is very much a "show me" world.
Protracted timeframes often result in eroded ROI
and scrubbed projects. Additionally, the expectations
our Clients have of their workforce are multiplied
when applied to their service providers.
These
are our Clients because this is what we do and
this where we excel. It is not just our rigorous
CMM Methodology, our fast-paced and judicious
Project Planning and execution, or our selective
Project requirements Team-based approach that
makes these organizations our Clients. It is mostly
because we share the same values and organizational
dynamics. We expect more of ourselves and our
team members. We work fervently to improve our
methodology, our project planning, our risk identification
and abatement techniques, our mastery or the technologies
employed in designing, building, managing, and
enhancing systems. We are more demanding regarding
the success of our projects, as these are our
calling card and our greatest reward.
Government.
Our government Clients are under tremendous pressure
to accomplish more with less. In the next five years
a very substantial fraction of the government workforce
will retire. The knowledge and experience of that
workforce will exit with retirement. The President
has issued the "President's Management Agenda
for E-Government". Agencies are required to
implement systems according to this agenda - improving
services and efficiencies in all dimensions - Government
to Citizen (G2C), Government to Business (G2B),
Government to Government (G2G), and Intra-governmental
Efficiency and Effectiveness (IEE). To meet these
Agenda we are tasked with designing, building, and
supporting systems that :
- are
web-based, database systems accessible from
anywhere
- provide
24 hour x 7 days a week service to Citizens
or Businesses,
- enable
Citizens and Businesses to obtain permits, certificates,
approval, or guidance in minutes instead of
hours or days,
- eliminate
paperwork for Citizens, Businesses, and the
Government,
- reduce
the time and effort required to accomplish tasks
among all parties,
- are
Secure, Section 508 compliant, support GPEA
initiatives,
- provide
embedded business rule support so that feedback
to the users is provided at the time the information
is provided,
- provide
high quality data (screened by business rules)
and available immediately after entry in the
permitting or certificating process,
- provide
analyses in the form of observations, inferences,
and decisions instead of tons of data,
- enable
data to be transparently shared across agencies,
- run
like a household appliance.
Additionally,
these systems require a translation of the business
domain from the operational mechanisms of their
predecessors into the realm of on line, direct
user oriented operations. These systems are more
'Citizen-centric', they are more streamlined and
Results-oriented. In most cases this requires
considerable process re-engineering, yet retention
of the essential properties required to meet regulatory
requirements. These new systems are not stand-alone
systems or "Islands of Automation" but
must be specified, designed, and constructed in
the context of related and cooperating systems
- taking every advantage of information available
from related or intersecting agencies. With todays
technologies and skilled developers, building
these systems is not the challenge. The challenge
(and ever pressing opportunity for defect) is
in the Design. We navigate all of these issues
resulting in extremely well designed systems that
meet all of the requirements on time and within
budget.
Commerical.
Our commercial Clients each have their own goals
and objectives. Most are anchored in one or more
of the following :
- Improve
Customer Service - improve value to the customer
through elevating organization services within
the values of their Customers.
- Improve
Profitability - improving efficiencies, effectiveness,
resource utilization, reduction in waste (time,
human resources, materials, transportation,
plant facilities...), defect reduction, ...
- Improve
Competitiveness - enhance the recognized value
of the goods and services in the eyes of the
Customer, understand the "Voice of the
Customer", meet and exceed Customer expectations,
The
primary concern today is Return on Investment
(ROI) and Risk Mitigation. The late 90's experienced
a period of "do everything and secure every
customer before the competition". The focus
was "get the system implemented within 90
days". Today the focus is "precisely
what resources will be required to design, build,
deploy, and support the system and what value
will it produce". Today commercial Clients
must be convinced of the value of new or enhanced
systems before any work is commenced. They need
systems that are razor focused on the requirements.
There are no funds for frills. They need systems
that will deliver on the expected ROI. They need
systems that are delivered without cost over-runs
due to unmitigated or unforseen risks. They need
to stretch every dollar through judicious decisions
and actions throughout the process - using previously
constructed objects whenever they are appropriate
and COTS components wherever they are practical.
They need the best and brightest people with many
projects of experience, because once the decision
is made to move forward all of the competitiveness,
profitability, and quality issues become very
presssing. There is no room for misteps or wrong
decisions. The system needs to meet all requirements
on time and within budget. Otherwise the projected
ROI will not be realised. They need these systems
to run like a household applicance, requiring
minimal maintenance. They need the supported decisions
and analyses to be easy to secure and completly
reliable.
These
qualities are what our Clients enjoy from us.
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Customer
Profile
Past
Performance
Agencies
and Companies
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