WorkScale & Perform

The most important part of any analysis and planning operation is understanding the existing systems and precisely what you want to achieve.

When reviewing the technology architecture, gaining an understanding that is both broad and deep is paramount to being able to assess its efficiency and to determining the proper path to enhance its performance. Equally important to the overall success, is coupling business requirements to the architecture and often leads to the simplest solutions of all: problem avoidance.

Avoiding the problem entirely is always the most elegant and effective solution.

A broad understanding must be established across both business and technical processes. What are the existing business requirements? How often and by what means are new business requirements introduced? Which are seen as technical challenges? How is business forecasting performed and how is that tied to trending and capacity planning?

Once we understand the current business and the technology in place to drive it, we work with you to develop goals that are simple:

• to reduce page services times to under 0.2 seconds;
• to increase server efficiency to reduce the server population by 15%;
• to isolate existing services to the negative performance effects of new beta features.

As these goals are specified, one needs to understand and quantify the current situation. This leads to question, questions and more questions. Modern applications consist of several layers stacked on top of each other, whose interactions may span several levels and whose effects can be anything but obvious. An oversight in any of these components can lead to severe performance deterioration, inaccuracy and even data loss. In the worst situations, these simple oversights can lead to complete and utter failure.

In order to fully understand how technology drives your business, we perform a survey of the technology "in-play" in the architecture. This includes hardware and software technology selection, network architecture, application and database architecture, storage solutions. And armed with this inventory we build an overarching technology picture.

We take the architecture and attempt to map each hardware and software component back to the business need that solicited its selection and configuration. This provides a powerful tool we call a "technology appropriateness map." Armed with all this information we can now translate the client business goals and perceived challenges into a fast-tracked needs analysis.

With needs understood, we are positioned to focus on the problems with the big picture in mind and develop rapid, accurate and complete solutions.