Delivery
Overview
Challenges & Opportunities
Today’s business environment is characterized by complexity, global interconnectedness, and the acceleration of everything from customer demands to production methods to the rate of change itself. Technology has contributed to each of these factors. Understanding and using the opportunities afforded by technology changes has become a primary cause of time and resource consumption in organizations.
IT departments have been frustrated by the time and effort it takes to develop and deploy business-driven solutions based on changing technology. They are increasingly aware of the negative impact and unacceptable business risks that poor quality results incur. Technology development and deployment projects can be extremely complex, which contributes to their difficulty. Technology alone can be a factor in project failures; however, it is rarely the primary cause.
Surprisingly, experience has shown that a successful project outcome is related more to the people and processes involved than to the complexity of the technology itself.When the organization and management of people and processes breaks down, the following effects on projects can be observed:
Disconnected stakeholders and/or irregular, random, or insufficient business input into the process, resulting in critical needs going un-captured.
Teams that don’t understand the business problem, don’t have clearly defined roles, and struggle to communicate internally and externally.
Lists of requirements that fail to address the real customer problems cannot be implemented as stated, omit important features, and include unsubstantiated features.
A vague project approach that is not well understood by the participants resulting in confusion, overwork, missing elements, and reduced solution quality.
Poor hand-off from project teams to operations, resulting in lengthy delays in realizing business value or costly workarounds to meet business demands.
Organizations that overcome these issues derive better results for their business through higher product and service quality, improved customer satisfaction, and working environments that attract the best people in the industry. These factors translate into a positive impact on bottom lines and improvements in the organization’s strategic effectiveness.
Infassure Delivery Framework
Infassure’s Delivery Framework (IDF) is a deliberate and disciplined approach to technology projects based on a defined set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, guidelines, and proven practices which contribute to the success of Infassure’s client technology projects. IDF provides a flexible and scalable framework that can be adapted to meet the needs of any project (regardless of size or complexity) to plan, build, and deploy business-driven technology solutions. IDF is based on well-known industry best practices, Microsoft’s® Solutions Framework introduced in 1994 and thousands of successful client projects.IDF is applied to improve success rates for the following types of projects:
Software development projects
Infrastructure deployment projects
Packaged application integration projects
Any complex combination of the above
Infassure has delivered hundreds of successful client projects. Our best practices eliminate risk and maximize return for complex IT projects. Following are the common threads that we weave through every client project.
SECURITY – IDENTITY & ACCESS CONTROL
Organizations today are confronted with a number of identity and access challenges. Chief among these are:
Complexity of managing identities across several systems.
The high cost and risk of provisioning and de-provisioning user accounts and access permissions.
The risk to the business of operating with weak credentials.
Help desk costs associated with password resets and smart card deployment.
These challenges impair business productivity and often result in higher complexity and cost for IT, lost productivity for the business user, and increased risk for the business. Infassure leverages its experience managing IT operations for its customers and best-in-class technologies to:
Keep identity information synchronized and consistent across a wide range of directories, databases, and proprietary identity systems.
Provide a single place for IT and end users to manage the life cycle of enterprise credentials from passwords to strong credentials such as certificates and smart cards.
Integrate with Active Directory, other Microsoft servers such as Microsoft SQL ServerTM for reporting, Microsoft System Management Server for asset and software management, and Microsoft Operations Manager for health monitoring.
This gives IT operations better control by:
Providing a best-in-class metadirectory engine, giving IT control and visibility over identity clean-up, synchronization, and reconciliation processes.
Providing IT a robust, policy-based management solution for controlling and helping secure resources.
Giving IT the tools to provide the control framework that allows them to effectively govern end users’ and business owners’ usage of self-service tools.
Open Standards
There are two types of standards: proprietary and open.
Proprietary = vendor dependent.
Some technology vendors develop proprietary standards to enable business partners, customers and other interested parties to build products or services that interoperate with that vendors’ products or services. Proprietary standards are geared specifically to products and services, rather than pursuing universal or cross-product interoperability.
Open = product independent.
Open standards are not tied to the products or services of any particular vendor, and the licensing terms do not restrict implementation to particular hardware or software products. Open standards are a technical specification developed and maintained by collaboration or consensus and offered to implementers under terms that permit them to develop their own products and services that interoperate with all other implementations of that specification.Open standards exist to enable interoperability in a marketplace of multiple competing implementations while ensuring certain minimum requirements are met. Infassure rigorously adheres to open standards in our client projects and solutions. We believe that open standards support interoperability and system integration as well as ensuring widespread user adoption.
Search/Access
“It is estimated that 80% of corporate information exists on employee PCs.” (Butler Group, 2005).
Infassure empowers our clients to quickly find the information they need from content repositories, intranet, and Internet Web sites. Our clients have told us that they need to access information scattered across the Web, located on different computers, devices, intranet's, servers, and databases. Infassure understands that in order for individuals to make the best business decisions, deliver the greatest business impact, and be as productive as possible, they must be able to find, use, and share relevant business information quickly, easily, and securely.
Find: Infassure empowers our clients by providing seamless access to relevant business information across the desktop, corporate network, and the Internet with familiar, easy–to-use interfaces.
Use: Infassure maximizes our clients’ employee productivity by enabling them to quickly and easily organize, integrate, and manage information via intuitive, familiar and easy–to-use interfaces.
Share: Infassure helps clients’ teams stay connected and productive in real time by providing direct access to the people and information they need.
Infassure recognizes that proper training is at the heart of successful project delivery and client adoption. Infassure leverages E-Learning to help our clients acquire greater skills so they can accomplish more in less time with the software tools we have designed and implemented for them. By boosting client skills, Infassure actually reduces the time spent on help-desk calls and end-user training.
E-Learning helps our clients get the maximum value from their IT projects investment by:
Lowering training costs by increasing staff productivity while avoiding the time and expense associated with off-site training.
Preparing client IT staff to successfully deploy, manage, and support Microsoft technologies for their companies/your organization.
Preparing end users for deployments so that our clients do not waste time fumbling through new applications, which means fewer help-desk calls and greater productivity.
IT projects create volumes of information that IT services firms and their clients must maintain, such as customer data, project details, and content from project documentation. Employees in a variety of job functions might need to work with this information, but may not have the required access privileges. Organizations could improve their information management efficiency by maintaining information in a searchable, accessible repository that enables workers to locate and reuse existing data, and build upon it.
Some challenges to the document authoring process that professional services organizations must manage are:
Poorly-organized content that can be difficult to locate
Difficulty assembling documents from existing sources
No efficient means of identifying and storing new content for reuse
Infassure solves these problems with a document creation and assembly solution built on the Microsoft Office® System that delivers secure access to an organization’s LOB application data and to document repositories.
| Requirement | Core Capabilities | Products |
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Simplify reuse of existing content |
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Capture new content for reuse |
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Improved access to existing documents |
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