Business and Technology Strategy
Our staff have provided trusted advice to organizations for decades, acting both as inside experts and outside consultants at the departmental and corporate level. We excel at multifactor, vertical-market-specific strategy engagements. In an era of disruption, we strive to find empirically based, actionable solutions to your organization’s current problems while anticipating and heading off future issues.
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Consulting Engagement Oversight & PMO
One of our core competencies is managing external engagements for our clients. Many large consulting firms intentionally underbid engagement pricing to capture the business, knowing up front that they’re going to have extensive cost, scope and scheduling updates. Even small engagements frequently have budget overruns of 10–15%, but we’ve seen multiyear programs approaching 40%.
We generally identify issues early and often can bring such engagements, not only on time, but on budget. We prefer to be at the table as a client partner while large projects are being negotiated, but we can also salvage existing projects or provide a second opinion on current PMO work, cost and timetable predictions.
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Enterprise & Legacy System Lifespan Analysis
The old joke is a “legacy system is one that works.” That ignores that many such systems are built on insecure, outdated, unsupported code libraries. Just because they’re “working” does not mean that they’re risk-free. Quite the contrary, many pose existential threats to the organizations that depend on them. In fact, many are based on dead coding languages, such as COBOL and Pascal. This list is now joined by almost a dozen dying languages, many of which were in their prime in recent memory, including Objective C, Ruby and Visual Basic.
If your legacy platform feels like a museum, we can help bring you up to date without sacrificing the essential functions of your existing systems.
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Tech Alignment & Forward Planning
Tech alignment is much more than predicting market trends. We look at the overall health of your organization’s tech platform(s) to see where it is in the maturity cycle. Too early, and it’s difficult to recruit workers. Too late, and maintenance costs can skyrocket. Too customized means it may be difficult or impossible to upgrade without having to rip out the entire system. Too basic, and it may not offer any strategic advantage over your competitors.
In our experience, most CIOs are not equipped to make these observations, and these engagement typically report to other members of the C-suite, including the CFO and CEO. Tired of losing sleep? Let us put your mind at rest.