Services

Architecture Development

The pace of change businesses face put continuing pressure on their IT operational processes and systems, and consequently the bottom line. Increasing volumes, new regulations, adoption of new business lines, increased competition, change programmes, and disruptive technologies result in different impacts on the automation upon which businesses rely.

When small, businesses can take an informal approach to the architecture of their business systems as volume, complexity, and functional gaps can be reasonable managed manually. But as complexity and volumes grow, actively managing your business systems’ architecture can mean the difference between an asset that adds value and streamlines your business processes and one that introduces manual work, increases technical debt, and stands in the way of business growth.

Incisive can work with you to establish architectures that fit your business needs and help position your systems for future growth. We can develop:

• Architectural visions and roadmaps that help set a course for the development of systems to be aligned with larger architectural goals.
• Architectural processes that establish proper governance, continued business alignment, and proper feedback to update your target architectures.
• Individual system architectures that align with your functional requirements as well as your overall goals and architectural roadmap.
• Enterprise architectures that consider the structure of systems within the broader context of your overall enterprise.

In any of our architectural engagements, we develop an understanding of relevant existing systems, business/IT units impacted, operational flows (both existing and target), functional and non-functional requirements, and any additional constraints that may shape the final architecture, whether technical or cultural.

Then, in collaboration with both your IT personnel and business consumers, we iteratively develop the required architectural artefacts and any supporting processes or materials needed to clearly communicate the semantics, structure, and timelines involved in the proposed architecture, using our industry experience and knowledge of best practices coupled with the requirements that are driving your organisation.

Finally, we provide help in socialising the proposed architecture within your organisation as appropriate.

The results are architectural artefacts that are closely aligned with your business priorities and goals and can serve to inform your IT department’s actions and projects going forward.

Due to the rapid pace of IT innovation, technological disruption has become the norm. Commodification/virtualisation of infrastructure, exposure of systems via APIs, extraction of new value from business data via analytics, and operational impacts due to cloud are only a few of the ways that technical innovations are having material impacts on business. This is on top of the usual IT concerns such as system rationalisation/decommissioning, cross-business line integration, technology selection, and programmes of change.

Customers expect rapid adoption of these disruptors, cleanly knitting their integration into existing systems while effectively managing adoption risks, all without breaking stride. But reacting to these changes and programmes can stress already stretched IT staff.

Incisive can use their industry experience, past engagements, and analysis of a particular client’s circumstances to provide clients advice and strategies for addressing material IT changes in their organisations. Incisive can provide you consultancy support for:

• Operating models definition, including generating new models based on planned changes or forecasting operating model impact due to the adoption of new technologies.
• Technology evaluations in order to select specific products upon which to standardise systems.
• Operational reviews in order to make explicit operating models of existing systems and IT units.
• System reviews aimed at identifying functional gaps, potential performance bottlenecks, technical debt, or as a prelude to a system update.
• Strategy development focusing on creating an IT strategy that aligns with your current business goals and drivers.

Consultancy engagements can take various forms from simply advising as to the practices of other businesses in a specific technology area to being more deeply embedded in your organization, allowing us more thoroughly understand your business and how it works in order to provide more bespoke advice.

Project Leadership

Incisive can provide project lead capacity for your internal or external projects. Incisive will work with your project stakeholders to understand both the functional and non-functional requirements, business environment, and relevant technologies in order to drive a project through to delivery. Incisive can help with such projects as:

• Software development, leading a team of developers and DevOps staff to deliver a system
• System migrations, organising and coordinating cut-overs from old systems to new.
• RFI management where a new class of system is required, and a process is needed to evaluate the alternatives on the market.
• Proof of concepts, leading a technical team in a trial implementation of a product or technology prior to purchase.

Python Development

Incisive has long experience working in Python, having developed with all three major versions of the language. We ‘get’ Python, recognising the incredible flexibility and accessibility of the language for everything from simple scripting to using the language itself as an expressive medium to convey higher semantics.

Incisive has created a variety of different deliverables in Python such as microservice-based multi-agent systems, web services, system modelling packages, and small utility libraries. We have experience in advanced features such as metaclasses, descriptors, enhanced semantics via the 'dunder' methods, dynamic classes, decorators, and C extension building.

Incisive can provide:

• Whole project outsourcing, where you can outsource the development of your Python system to Incisive.
• Development capacity, embedding Python expertise into your own development teams.
• Training, providing instruction on Python itself and how to create “Pythonic” programs.