EC|Wise, Inc. - Strategic IT Management

Leading and planning Enterprise Architecture
Both at the board level and the application development level, EC Wise personnel has the skills and the experience to help you design your IT processes and manage your IT workload.
Strategic Development
From reading the technology press, formulating a technology strategy sounds easy. Take a couple of tablespoons of web services, cook them in a pot of .NET or J2EE, add a can of the appropriate industry specific XML schema, and stir in support for mobile devices. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. Our Requirements Analysts can help. If you have concerns about transition processes, we have senior IT executives who are experienced as outsourced CTOs and VPs of Engineering, Product and Change Managers.
Use pilot projects to vet strategy

We recommend that organizations make pilot projects an essential part of their information technology practice. They play two roles. The first is a validation role: use a pilot project to determine the applicability of a promising methodology or toolset to your business requirements, or to validate a set of requirements and candidate workflows within your organization. The second is an advance development role: employ a limited scope pilot project to determine how to most effectively leverage a new toolset or methodology within your organizational context. There are a number of good reasons to outsource pilot projects to EC Wise. By their nature, pilot projects require skill sets that are not usually available on internal teams. Even if they have those skills, your developers probably lack experience using a project as a proving ground for a technology and using what they learn as the basis for doing technology transfer within your organization. At the same time, if a pilot project fails, having outsourced it avoids leaving one of your internal teams with the stigma of a failed project. EC Wise offers broad and deep experience in pilot projects. For an online HR management company, we produced a prototype for a part of their application to validate that server side Java was the right language choice and to identify key architectural patterns for their software. For a major cable provider, we carried out a C#/.NET pilot project using an agile development process both to identify coding practices for high performance data intensive winform applications and to develop a set of best practices the organization would adopt for its ongoing development efforts. For an online community called Mindport, we built early application mockups to illustrate a new product direction.

Use rules engines to drive your business

We believe that beneath all the technology developments is a trend towards rules based computing where processes flow through networks automatically, with exceptions kicked out for special handling. Real decisions have to be made: which side of the .NET/J2EE fence will you play on? What's the right database and feature set? What analytical mechanisms will you employ to determine the rules, and how will you validate their outputs? EC Wise can provide in-depth insights to support the development of a real time rules based future.
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Effective Business Process Reengineering
A classic definition of Business Process Reenginerring is the activity by which an enterprise reexamines its goals and how it achieves them, followed by a disciplined approach of business process redesign. We support this definition by providing broad analytical services and design analysis through early stage BPR. Once strategies become cogent, we design flexible and agile implementation strategies.
Customize a design and development process

Over the past couple of years we have witnessed development process wars between the heavy process camps that preach the merits of top down planning and extensive documentation and the light process camp that says the only thing that matters is working code. We believe that there is no globally right answer, there's only what's right for you. In fact, its unlikely that you can take an off the shelf process and apply it directly to your organization. That's where we come in. Use EC Wise to help design a process that makes the most sense for you, and to work with your development teams through that transition. We have worked with most of the processes you might consider: classic waterfall, RUP, XP, and Agile. As VPs of Engineering at past companies, we had to pioneer process development before many of today's books were published. As EC Wise, we have worked with a variety of companies to develop a process and establish the key activities necessary to support that process. We can do it for you.
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ERP and Process Management Competencies
ERP/process management is more than a multi-module application software system. EC Wise approaches every ERP/process management implementation and upgrade with a view to providing customers the maximum value for their considerable investment by focusing on the big picture. First, we ensure that the proposed work meets the business requirements. Then we go further by leveraging our considerable expertise in Business Analytics, OLAP and data mining to provide additional value to customers installing SAP R/3, Oracle and other large application suites.
More about our team ERP experience

SAP R/3 full life cycle implementations Integrating third party applications to SAP R/3 using standard R/3 technologies ERP implementations of other vendors' products Integrations and enhancements to ERP implementations OLAP and Business Intelligence activities around ERP installations Ongoing support and maintenance activities

Designing effective workflow processes

We use our rapid requirements design methods to determine existing workflows and bottlenecks, and to identify functional areas that are not getting the information required to ensure effective decisions. Then we work on addressing the choke points. In many cases, we can identify decisions that can be completely automated based on decision rules, thereby reducing the amount of human touchpoints throughout the process. Where additional knowledge is required, we can design new analytic solutions using statistical techniques, data mining, or text mining methods that will yield the new insights required to support process optimization.
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Strategic IT Management

Use pilot projects to vet strategy

Use rules engines to drive your business

Customize a design and development process

More about our team ERP experience

Designing effective workflow processes