Providence Technology Group

Clearly, there’s a lot of buzz about blockchain and its best-known implementation, bitcoin. Newsflash January 15, 2018:  Blockchain in the Boardroom: Toward Enterprise Deployment Newsflash January 15, 2018:  BLJ: Is Blockchain the future or simply ‘witchcraft’ Newsflash January 11, 2018:  MoneyGram Signs Deal to Work With Currency Startup Ripple Financial analysts have been watching in cautious amazement as bitcoin captures the attention of Wall Street.  Did you know that you can purchase your own bitcoin at an ATM in the Galleria Mall, at many gas stations and liquor stores, too? But what is a blockchain?  According to the Harvard Business Review, a blockchain is “an open distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties in a verifiable and permanent way.”  A blockchain ...[Read More]

See the Difference Optimization Makes – Step 1  Your Challenge: Projects experience cost and budget overruns and fail to meet key requirements. Process bottlenecks slow down development unnecessarily. New technologies significantly challenge existing processes, contributing to process breakdown. QA is focused on the wrong bugs. Issues that should have been solved during development are added to the QA workload. Software requirements continually change and developers can’t keep pace. Communication between the business and IT is infrequent and unclear. Our Advice – Step 1 Design High Level Solutions Step 1 breakdown: 1.1 Get the right people involved 1.2 Establish a High Level Design Specification 1.3 Optimize for Business and Regulatory Compliance 1.4 Obtain Stakeholder Approval  ...[Read More]

Build a Business-Driven Application Roadmap Using an Agile Approach Support your ongoing business objectives with a rationalized application portfolio while remaining aligned with your current and future technology needs. Your Challenge Due to application sprawl, many of today’s organizations have reached a point where they are supporting many applications that offer minimal to no business value. Application roadmap projects are often shelved due to the complexity of scale. Organizations are looking for ways to align their business priorities to current and future decisions for applications. Our  Advice Complication Application leaders do not have an excellent understanding of their application portfolio because they lack the processes required to gather accurate and applicable information...[Read More]

You’re a consultant.  It’s Day One of your new engagement.  Not too many people are smiling during this first meeting of stakeholders.  In front of you is a 1” binder half full of unorganized paperwork on the project.  You need to deliver something in 6 weeks.  People don’t seem to be talking to each other – yelling maybe, but not talking.  What have you gotten yourself into?  Isn’t that why you became a consultant in the first place – so you could get away from office politics. When asked how they dealt with office politics, here is how some fellow consultants answered: First off, as a consultant, you are probably at this new engagement because the client needs something changed.  Change can be hard.  Listen.  Listen to your supporters and detractors.  Communicate.  Pull out (or develop) ...[Read More]

Thinking of switching careers?  What about rounding out your current skill sets?  Making yourself more marketable? What do Business Analysts do? According to the International Institute of Business Analysis, “a business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.”  The business analyst (BA) understands specific business issues and can recommend solutions that help the organization reach their goal.  BA’s can work in a number of roles including: Eliciting requirements Documentation Process re-engineering Systems Analysis What types of skill sets do Business Analysts need? General Business Skills.  A good BA should have an analytical approach to problem so...[Read More]

Providence Technology Group Business Intelligence (BI) services are designed to provide the strategic advantages our clients need to convert data into consistent, actionable information. Our advice: The CIO is responsible and accountable for providing the business with accurate information. All it takes is just one bad business decision to begin preparing for your not too distant job search. Involve the Head of BI in developing a BI tool strategy. BI 2.0 (advanced) capabilities (predictive, real-time, social and big data analytics) are being used more than ever. Organizations are adopting them as they provide significant opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. If the business isn’t demanding these capabilities now, they will soon. Plan for BI 2.0 capabilities now before the organizati...[Read More]

Last time I checked, the sun was shining.  Actually, it has been shining pretty much every day since April, and even when it isn’t shining, there is still enough light to grow plenty of grass (and weeds).  Even if the sun was shining (and I needed to mow the grass), I still had to work on a deliverable for a client.  My wireless mouse died – actually the batteries died.  So, I drove my 30 mpg car to the large club warehouse store (kind of rhymes with Moscow) to pick up a megapack of AAA batteries.  I use each battery once and then drop them in the Hazardous Waste container in the garage.  In a few months, I’ll have enough to drive them over to the County’s Hazardous Waste Drop-Off Center. That’s a lot of batteries – to buy, use once and turn into hazardous waste. Well, there’s a simple cha...[Read More]