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 Customer Profile
 
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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