Big Enough To Matter, Too Small To Count

Technology Solutions is a small business.  We have big business needs.

In this fashion, we are the same as many of our customers.  We are too small to afford customized or enterprise solutions for our needs and too big to have a canned solution meet all our needs.  In our experience, most small to mid-size businesses exist in this gap.   As a result, they either pay more for a solution than is reasonable for the organization size, or adjust business processes to fit inside the box of capabilities provided by a CotS (Commercial, off the Shelf) solution.  

As a company providing process improvment and technology solutions, we fundamentally disagree with both options.  Since we can’t complain without offering a solution, we have developed an approach to helping organizations meet their needs at an appropriate cost.  We do this by getting to and executing step 4 in the following high level overview of our Assessment/Analysis service offering:

1. Define the current environment/system - including process mapping, existing resources, and culture.
2. Measure the pain – the total cost of the current process (the sum of hard costs, lost opportunity, process errors, and non-value add activities). 
3. Design a future state – what the business process or function will be (not at a technical level, but operationally).
4. Architect the technical solution to achieve the future state – make the business process/function drive the technical solution.

This sounds and feels complicated and expensive, and it has the potential to be both if not executed well.  To execute well, there are a few criteria:

1. Experience- This is a practice that requires repetition and a history of successful engagements.
2. Neutrality- This process works best when you don’t have a stake in the current process and are not affected by internal politics (or as little of both as practical). 
3. Knowledge- You have to think outside the box of the current environment and existing process.  Incremental changes to a process only produce incremental improvements.
4. Practicality- Understand and work towards a practical solution, using a sensible amount of effort.  Too much time or cost put into a process can negate potential benefits. 

When you keep the above in mind, it is easy to scale a process assessment/technical solution up or down to meet the cost/effort constraints of any project. 

The end result?  You get a solution that is neither too big, small, or expensive.   As always, feel free to contact us for more information/questions.