Overview
Convergent Informatics creates information technology strategies for information driven businesses. Convergent Informatics has the background and expertise to minimize a company's total spend on computer infrastructure and systems and related personnel needs.
Business Analysis
Businesses are like machines. They should have no unnecessary parts and operate smoothly. Many businesses have grown organically over time, and parts that once served them well have become obsolete or wear out. Start up businesses may not know what parts they need.
Our business analyses presents the processes and information flows of your business in a clear way.
Proper business analyses shows you where to:
Deploy new processes: When processes are "make-do", their original purpose suffers and the new work lags. However when a process is planned, designed and implemented properly it can result in significant time and cost savings.
Replace unused or irrelevant processes: Tasks done "because we've always done it like that" drain energy from new business lines and ideas. Processes that once produced value are no longer returning on their investment and need to go.
Fit processes to right-size technologies: Install or replace inadequate or over-engineered systems with those that serve the business rather than the vendor.
Improve talent: Apply personnel training and skills alignment to the people bottlenecks in the organization.
Motivate people: When employees understand how their share of the work helps the company, they take on more ownership.
Discover new information: Knowledge about your customers, products, and suppliers may be tacit and hence un-shared across the organization. How many times should the business pay someone to enter the same information into different systems?
Business analysis is always tied to company goals. By showing how the day-to-day activities of the company match to goals, a solid business analyses helps you make informed decisions, invest intelligently and plan correctly.
IT Strategy and Tactical Planning
Strategic plans align the goals and business direction to the technology direction and investment. Not all planned items are big investments, but many include directional goals for employees and managers to be more effective at using what is already in place.
Tactical plans execute projects within the overall strategic plan. These are the deployments, planned retirements, system tune ups, business process improvements and changeovers needed to move the business forward. The efforts must take place in the larger framework of the strategic IT direction and overall business plans in order to evaluate them fairly.
Critical elements of these plans cover:
Technology plans: List of technologies supporting the business processes; where they are deployed where and how they will evolve over time.
Capital plans: Planned upgrades and depreciation schedules for IT purchases. Many companies waste cash through incorrect accounting of equipment and do not budget for eventual replacement, leading to a cycle of crash-and-burn upgrade projects.
Expense plans: Clear cost accounting for IT operational expenses. Over seventy percent of IT budgets can be consumed by operations. Expense plans are critical yardsticks for the business to measure and improve itself.
Activity plans: Just as IT expenses consume budgets, talented people can lose their time in operational work, hamstringing critical new projects. An activity plan, budgeting people's time, can keep staff on track to completion.
Training plans: Keeping people up-to-date is an often overlooked or assumed expense.
Systems Architecture
A good enterprise architecture view of the business provides the high-level vantage required to plan process and IT improvements. Architectures describe the overall deployment of applications, their interactions, their technologies, and their capacities. They typically display "big box" block-level interaction and major information interchanges between business functions.
Convergent Informatics describes architectures in Zachman, The Open Group Architecture Framework, Unified Modeling Language, and in the plain English our clients understand. The greatest value is in thinking through the business's overall structure and bringing it to light in the context of its technology deployments.
The difference between systems and enterprise architectures are often a matter of scope. All need to contain key elements of
Information endpoints: Define where critical business records reside and where the single point of truth (SPOT) exists.
System gaps: Find missing processes and applications or poor hand-offs between business systems.
System capacity and throughput constraints: How much work can these systems perform and how much are they being asked to do.
Infrastructure utilization: The application's resource consumption of the underlying infrastructure, if uncontrolled, can consume costs savings and the value of the application.
Deployment models and descriptions: For legacy applications, many times the extent of its deployment and dependencies are unknown. Where dependencies exist, there also lie hidden failures.
Operational and business costs: Accounting for the non-infrastructure resource consumption is necessary to monitor total ownership costs.
Systems designs are sometimes confused with architectures. Convergent Informatics designs and writes systems designs and specifications using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and these detailed descriptions are meant to roll up into overall systems architecture models.
Information Governance
Information governance is effective, secure management of critical business data. A governance plan enables a company to understand the complexities and risks surrounding the information it generates and relies upon.
Governance enables a business to understand how to:
Manage ownership risk: A risk-based assessment pinpoints where to spend effort securing and controlling information.
Control owernship costs: Not everything is worth keeping. Service and support costs for managing outdated, redundant, irrelevant, or non-business related information is minimal compared to the time employees waste wading through files trying to find what they need.
Comply with regulations: Fulfill governmental requirements for filings and inspections without halting business.
Prepare for litigation: Respond quickly and surely to requests for information; avoid unwarranted discovery.
Detect and respond to leaks: Ensure information is handled correctly and minimize data loss in the event of a privacy breach.
Mitigate interruptions: As part of a business continuity plan, ensure your information can be safely managed by new processes while the rest of the business returns to operation.
IT Management and Talent Assessment
Talent assessment is the first step to talent alignment. It determines whether a company's management approach and employee skills match up to the information systems that customers have put into place or are planning to put in place.
After assessment, we develop plans to fill IT talent gaps with either internal hiring or training.
Talent plans and assessments:
Match employees skills to processes: Know where employees' skills are at and what they are expected to do with the information technology they use every day.
Validate IT skillsets: Assess who is most effective with the toolkits they use.
Find skills gaps: IT changes annually, and today's "in demand" people and technology become yesterday's news with alarming speed. With a gap analysis for current and planned projects, your company can develop hiring and training plans with the future in mind.
Develop certification paths: Put a learning ladder plan for employees to help them be more successful. The rungs may include industry certification programs for those in professional and technical tracks.
Couple management practice to technology: Managers cannot manage what they do not understand. Make sure management knows and can fairly judge what technical and process contributors are providing.
Many professional training programs offer excellent technical training, but that is their only focus. They do nothing to match their training to a business need. With a clear management and talent assessment in hand, you can allocate training and hiring efforts to fit your business domain.
Putting It Together
Convergent Informatics pulls together People, Processes and Technology that:
Enable businesses to understand and plan for the total cost of their Information Systems: equipment, software, governance, and people, and their skills.
Gets businesses to minimize the total spend to create and own infrastructure and information, and how to gain maximum value from that investment.
Addresses how all a firm's technologies work -- or don't work-- together.
Plans capacity needs in advance of breakpoints.
Ensures firms understand and improve their entire business infrastructure: People (and their skills), processes and technologies,
We analyze a company's processes and goals and then build an integrated plan tailored to each company's organizational strategy and risk tolerance. Convergent Informatics can:
Provide support for a simple tune-up to a complete re-design of how business and information systems work together
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Help jump start a business' infrastructure and systems planning and avoid the pitfalls of off-the-cuff design and deployment.
Enable a company's compliance with regulatory requirements, adopt appropriate industry best practices and secure critical information.
Our integrated plan lays out how all of a business' Information Systems -- from networks to desktops, from applications to business processes, from security to information recovery processes, from people to the processes they follow -- come together to run a business.
Beyond simple saving and efficiencies, the integrated plan enables improved, organizational-wide technology use. A managed approach to hardware and software expenses helps turn a company's IT investment from a cost center into a competitive advantage. We help clarify what a company needs to do succeed, and more importantly, what a company does not need to do. The result is a business operation that is better able to manage change and growth. In our Virtual CIO capacity we connect our customers to a network of experts and vendors to execute plans and deliver solutions.
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