IT Strategic Planning

In essence, strategic planning means clarifying an organization’s main purpose, aligning its priorities and resources with that purpose, and identifying how to judge success in fulfilling that purpose. The strategic planning process therefore leads to the definition of the IT organization’s mission, the formulation of IT-specific goals, and the development of actions that will be implemented to meet those goals.

Integrating business and information technology (IT) processes allow for continuous assessment and necessary adjustments in response to new opportunities and changing market conditions.

Four elements are basic to any strategic planning process:

• Deals with an enterprise’s interaction with its environments, necessitating a thorough and complete understanding of the entities in that environment, and the nature of the interactions.
• Addresses the allocation of significant resources, such as large amounts of capital, labor and capacity.
• Concentrates on long-term issues; however, increasingly, strategic planning also concentrates on short-term issues that have long-term consequence
• Becomes the primary responsibility of middle-to-top-level management and executive decision makers; however, the planning process engages decision makers at all levels.

Mentis has successfully dealt with these four elements and developed strategic plans for IT organizations in various industries. We provide consultants who are experienced in various project planning and management methodologies like Rational Unified Process methodologies and UML.

Functional Architecture

A strong Enterprise Architecture process should help to answer basic questions like:

• Is the current architecture supporting and adding value to the organization?
• How might architecture be modified so that it adds more value to the organization?
• Based on what we know about what the organization wants to accomplish in the future, will the current architecture support or hinder that?

Our consultants analyze the organization’s strategy and structure, the architecture process then flows down into the discrete information technology components such as:

• Organization charts, activities, and process flows of how the IT Organization operates
• Organization cycles, periods and timing
• Suppliers of technology hardware, software, and services
• Applications and software inventories and diagrams
• Interfaces between applications – that is: events, messages and data flows
• Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and outside of the organization
• Databases and supporting data models
• Hardware, platforms, and hosting: Servers and where they are kept
• Local and Wide Area Networks, Internet connectivity diagrams

Infrastructure Planning

Most clients seek an IT Infrastructure Management model that is highly automated, efficient, where resources are utilized properly, highly available and where there is potential for cost savings.

We have developed proven methodologies to accommodate all these needs of our clients.