Consulting

Consulting

The journey to successful Enterprise Integration projects starts with good planning and design of operational processes and architecture standards. Organisations often face challenges during this critical early stage due to the limited skills and experience within their Architecture and DevOps teams. Integral Zone can provide your teams with these essential skills to ensure your projects are built on strong foundation. By augmenting your teams we enable them to formulate operational and architectural standards which act as a foundation for a successful DevOps operation. Our consultants, architects and developers can work with your teams across the entire DevOps lifecycle to ensure gaps in skills and knowledge are addressed.

IZ Consulting Services address the skills gaps within your project teams and empower projects with our experience in architecture best practice and project delivery.

C4E* Best Practice Alignment
* C4E is an approach defined by MuleSoft

  • Centre for Enablement (C4E) is an organisational approach that redefines the “Centre of Excellence” to have more focus on enablement and delivery. Through a unique operating model the C4E provides best practice and methods for business and IT to build, innovate and deliver projects with agility and strong governance.
  • Once set up, an organisational C4E provides skills, tools, templates and assets for accelerating the development of new APIs and applications. This allows IT teams to transform towards becoming enablers of the business.
  • The C4E approach helps organisations to unlock their assets and data to create self-serve capabilities that the business can consume through APIs. This reduces the workload on IT Departments and promotes reusability while also freeing up their time to focus on other project activity.

IZ Consultants can augment your teams and provide knowledge during every stage of the C4E lifecycle:

  • Gaining Executive buy-in

    Positioning the C4E concept through making it relevant to the customer, for example helping with business case quantification or roadmap planning for maturity assessment milestones.

  • Define C4E operating model

    Supporting planning questions such as; should I use dedicated or virtual staffing, how best should I define roles, responsibilities and ownership for example who produces which assets, how do I identify the right resources and build the core C4E team, how do I ensure the C4E team is keeping skills current through the right training, how do I plan and estimate detailed backlogs and work breakdown structures. These are just some of the questions our experienced resources can support you with during the definition of your operating model.

  • Build C4E foundational assets

    Help define the operational standards and onboarding / onramp processes to enable developers to get started, discover and consume services quickly. Our consultants and developers support across many aspects of the building of these foundational assets such as; configuration of Exchanges as common asset repositories, building and publishing initial sets of reusable assets for example API templates and common services, build best practices for example coding and operating guidelines and common API patterns.

  • Evangelising and monitoring the C4E

    IZ resources can help your teams to evangelise the C4E to business and developments teams through, for example, brown bag sessions to educate teams on the C4E concept and how it can benefit them. This process is critical for creating a feedback model from the potential user community and supports the creation of KPIs to measuring satisfaction levels through monitoring consumption, developer engagement and productivity.

  • Scaling C4E with greater adoption

    Once the C4E is successful, your organisation needs to ensure it is able to sustain growth. IZ Consulting Services can support you through our training programmes and access to global resource pools. Growth often brings questions such as; should I move from virtual to dedicated teams, how can I ensure staff are well trained and continuously developing their skills and knowledge and how can I ensure API lifecycle management is optimised.

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Architecture and Design Review

  • Many organisations require a review of their architectural designs and implementations to provide them with confidence in their designs. This reduces the risk exposure for organisations by ensuring their designs are fit for purpose and able to meet the demands of the business.

  • The types of risks we commonly see Organizations exposed to by not having the appropriate ADR include: performance degradation, security vulnerabilities, functionality gaps or complete failure of the platform.

  • IZ consultants often work on two types of scenarios. Firstly, where organisations have designed a solution and a review is required pre-implementation. Secondly, where organisations have implemented their designs but are encountering issues.

  • This service duration is typically 2-4 weeks and the deliverable is a report which details all aspects relevant to an ADR

The IZ Architecture Design Review will focus on the following activities:

  • Granularity of the services

  • Logging mechanisms

  • Exception handling strategy

  • Overall review of DevOps best practices

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Technology Evaluation

  • At IZ we are technology agnostic and have experience working with different technologies. We understand the strengths and weaknesses of platforms in the marketplace and support organisations with making the right choices based on their individual needs.

  • The types of factors we consider when evaluating software services for organisations include platform performance, product maturity, level of community and enterprise support, partners and software ecosystem for example connectors, TCO and skills availability.

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Migration

  • Migration planning and implementation are common activities which all organisation will face during their Enterprise Integration projects. At IZ we have extensive experience of supporting teams with migration planning and Implementation services.

  • During the planning stages we help organisations with identifying the impact of the migration including the components affected, the interfaces deprecated, the modified connectivity mechanisms and overall impact on the downstream and upstream systems.

  • During implementation, IZ consultants support teams through the migration activities and sanity check the migrated components once migration is complete. Often, depending on the scale of migration it is cost effective to develop some automated testing process and tooling. IZ has developed best practices in automating the migration sanity checking process.

We are happy to have a discussion for a different requirement or queries regarding the
services we provide.

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Training Services

Training Services

IZ Training Services enable your people to achieve the necessary knowledge and certifications to succeed through online and classroom training as well as real world on the job training.

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