Clean it, Shape it, Move it, Use it. Better data = better business.
As a fledgling enterprise, small and start-up businesses often take advantage of simple software solutions which adequately meet the needs of the business in its formative years.
However, as the business grows, requirements start to shift and there comes a time when long-range systems planning and a structured investment programme are essential to allow the continued growth of the business. At this stage, sound advice and strategic planning are paramount to ensure the technical changes bring stability, scalability and return on investment.
We help our clients through this critical phase of development with a blend of workshops and consulting sessions, on-site diagnostics and analysis, system roadmap development and implementation direction.
When a new software product is being developed, or when an off-the-shelf system cannot meet all necessary requirements, a bespoke solution is sometimes the only viable route. In these cases, intelligent system design is critical from the outset since the architecture devised at the start of such a project may persist for years, possibly decades, as the system evolves.
The initial system design should provide a platform upon which all future requirements can be developed. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of - and allowance for - all possible future implications is critical and must be thoroughly embedded into the architecture. Careful planning in these vital early stages leads to a solid foundation that will allow for a more agile, efficient and cost-effective development of the system as it grows and evolves.
Fundamentally, there are two basic approaches when it comes to engineering systems for business:
Develop a large, single system that aims to cater for all the needs of the business.
As a business grows,
usually becomes the only viable route since a single system cannot possibly fulfil every demand of the business to a satisfactory level. In turn, this presents a new set of complex integration challenges which must be solved in order to get the multitude of smaller sub-systems talking to one another.
To address these challenges, system analysis is initially required to assess system compatibility. Provided integration is possible, integration design and implementation then follows. Crucially, robust monitoring and alerting systems should be embedded within the integration technology to ensure that connections between the systems are not broken in the face of all-too-common changes to the component systems and surrounding interface layers.
We offer integration feasibility studies and project planning to help guide integration strategy. These are delivered through a series of high-level planning workshops and detailed interface analysis sessions leading to evaluation reports and implementation guidelines as output. In some cases, we also work with our clients to roll-out integration projects, including development, testing and post-implementation support and maintenance.
Modern businesses generate huge volumes of electronic information. Left unchecked, this data becomes cumbersome and often leads to inefficient business processes and operations. However, in the right hands, and with the right attention, the same data can be transformed to provide valuable insights and aid strategic decision making.
We provide a range of data services including detailed start-point analysis, development of automated migration and cleansing scripts, data migration and reporting services. All our work in this area is geared towards the discovery of truthful insights within the otherwise nebulous data which many businesses hold.
