ICT Consulting – Northpoint Consulting Inc.

ICT Consulting

When clients undertake an ICT project, we help them understand the options that exist, associated costs, the process and help them create a strategy for board or other necessary approvals.

Many companies for example, are concerned about their security infrastructure, we provide much needed support throughout the process. We conduct network audits and assessments and develop strategies with accompanying solutions to chart the way ahead.

A consultant can assist in bringing your digital transformation ideas to reality including strategic network planning, design, technical implementation and more.

Strategic ICT Planning & Design: Evolutionary Perspective

Northpoint Consulting has acknowledged that strategic network planning has evolved from the basic capacity planning and rollout of traditional ICT resources, to encompass changing business models being driven increasingly by the need to deliver digital services. The speed and scope of innovation in technology and digital business models is increasingly disrupting established business models in both the private and the public sector. The business community and the general public in Barbados and the Caribbean region expect to use and benefit from more digital services. From our perspective, what we have seen is that the businesses and agencies we support in the Caribbean now need to focus more on strategies to transform services using current and emerging digital or ICT capability and less on management of ICT assets as this is now a more mature discipline based on the evolution of frameworks such as ITIL. The digital and ICT strategic planning framework depends on new planning techniques to strengthen the development of digital or ICT strategies or plans, roadmaps, initiative proposals as well as implementation plans.

Digital and ICT strategic planning processes and its outputs provide our clients with:

improved alignment of digital capability to business strategies and needs
optimization of digital resources and capability to achieve business goals
a focused work plan to expand digital service capability across the business
measurement of the success of implementing business as well as digital and ICT strategies
improved understanding of the impact of digital and ICT on the business
identification of areas for cost reduction, risk reduction and leveraging opportunities in a business’ digital or ICT portfolio
increased visibility of digital investments and initiatives
expanded strategic planning capability.

To this end we work with our partners to:

Address how services can be transformed to support future business needs and consumer expectations; and document likely benefits, costs and risks.
Create visions, roadmaps and plans that link digital investments to business strategies.
Find digital approaches to exploit business opportunities and solve problems by leveraging knowledge of enterprise architecture and of ICT innovation, support effective delivery of services, and support future service design activities.
Provide plans that are critical input to the investment governance process. These investment plans provide decision makers with a forecast view of digital investment opportunities including benefits, cost, risks and the incremental transformation of services with sufficient detail to support strategic and tactical investment planning.

ICT must-haves for your business

The modern business environment is defined by rapid change. Customer expectations about the minimum service levels they will tolerate are escalating. Threats from competitors are more focused and come from both local and global sources. Businesses can struggle to be noticed and to stay relevant above the “noise” in dynamic marketplaces. And business-enabling technology is also changing at a dizzying speed. Caribbean-based enterprises cannot afford to be caught unprepared by the intensity and effectiveness of global competitors in the local/regional market, enabled by the ubiquity of the Internet.

In this environment it can be hard for a business just to keep pace with the change in its environment, far less make progress.

What are some ICT essentials in which Caribbean-based businesses should invest to give them a chance to compete effectively?

A Speedy Internet Connection – a productive office environment is unlikely without enabling your employee’s access to fast internet services. A responsive Internet service facilities communication with customers, partners, remote team members, etc. Your business internet plan should provide adequate bandwidth to support the operations of all your individual employees. What we have also seen and learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that online collaboration is indispensable – your bandwidth must be sufficient to allow easy online video calls and other collaboration tools to work smoothly.
An Effective Communications Platform – If you can successfully streamline work communication, you can ease work stress for yourself and your employees and enhance workplace productivity at the same time. The key to this is a Voice Over IP(VoIP) platform/service that allows you the facility of a PBX for inter-office calls without having a physical PBX, and that works seamlessly whether members of the team are in the office or not. Integrating the VoIP PBX with online collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams is also a key capability. Make available multiple portals for communication for the best results from your communication enterprise tech network and infrastructure.
Flexible Work Solutions – If you’re starting a new business or even planning to upgrade your existing business, you need to invest in enterprise tech tools to enable for remote work. Generally, these will be cloud-based tools which you can procure on a monthly subscription basis. They allow you to share virtual workspaces and files and employees can review the same file irrespective of their medium of access.
Improved client-focused network and systems – You need to be able to provide quick resolutions to any customer/client concerns and investing in technology and tools to enable efficient customer service will pay dividends. You also need to generate leads and convert them into paying customers/service users to make a profit. A cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software tool can help you manage your business’s relationships with both potential leads and existing customers. The possibilities to enhance your systems are endless and highly customizable to suit the business needs.
Online presence – Your business website is one of the most valuable tech tools at your disposal. This is a space for you to provide consumers with critical information about your business, such as products and services offered, prices, and opening hours. By optimizing your website and online platforms to suit your business environment you can avoid customer and team frustration and spend more time on your next innovation instead of your current spate of user performance issues.
Cybersecurity capability – To protect your investment in the tools noted above, and by extension, your core business, the final key ICT ingredient required in any modern enterprise is some means of defending your operation from cyber-attacks. ICT tools are tremendous business facilitators, but they also invite new threats. Cybersecurity is a serious concern for any business owner. You must ensure that sensitive company and customer data is protected and that your network is not hijacked, and data corrupted or held to ransom and of course that the integrity of any payment systems is preserved.

Building a robust network

If we consider the network as the ICT components that provide the underlying infrastructure that facilitates the seamless flow of information between the enterprises’ stakeholders (staff, suppliers, customers, etc.) to meet business objectives, then it becomes important to consider why and how the network should be designed and built as robustly and with as much resilience as practical.

A poorly designed network can trigger many problems which can hamper the operations of the business: slow data rates, security breaches, inadequate support for remote workers, and even complete downtime affecting the entire office location. A thoughtful network design should incorporate features that will mitigate the risk of these common types of network impairment, or make service restoration much quicker, including: redundancy in core network elements, automatic failover between key circuits, designing with capacity growth in mind, centrally managed security infrastructure, etc.

For customized network designs that are optimized for maximum resiliency within your budget, contact Northpoint Consulting.

Technical Implementation

Data breaches… should you be worried?

Design & Planning

Northpoint Consulting’s team has the experience and competence to help our clients plan and design network expansions, retrofits, migrations, equipment refreshes or complete network transformations. Our consultants provide network design services and lay out step by step how a new network will be built and how existing services will be migrated to the new infrastructure. We can help you define the optimal solutions for network security and how to deploy them.

Kicking-off engagements with detailed discovery sessions, we collaborate with your team to recommend industry best practices and assist in creating specific software configurations that support an infrastructure that is flexible, scalable and secure. Specific services in this portfolio include:

Network Architecture
Network Detailed Design
Security Design
Migration Planning
Test Planning
Integration Planning

For specific statements of work, we will assess the level of effort required and will provide a firm price proposal tailored to the SOW.

Integration and Migration

Northpoint Consulting can plan and execute an entire network/system deployment strategy from start to finish. Our process is based on straightforward principles: identify the business goals, define the migration process, develop schedules and checklists, identify risks and mitigations, and manage the implementation.

Services sets that fall under this category include:

Project management
Network Implementation
Commissioning and Testing
Network Integration
Service Migrations
Routing Policy Changes

Either with our own in-house team members, or leveraging resources provided by experienced contractors, we have designed and implemented network infrastructure across most of the Caribbean, including: Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Maarten, Aruba, Curacao, Belize,

For specific statements of work, we will assess the level of effort required and will provide a firm price proposal tailored to the SOW.

Optimize your network for growth and success.

Critical ICT choices that affect your organization’s bottom line

A business must make difficult choices about where to invest limited capital. Expenditure in ICT must contend with other investment opportunities. In for-profit enterprises, decisions on how much to spend, and on what, are heavily influenced by considerations of what options make the most impact to the bottom line. ICT investment decisions are often made on direct evaluations of the extent to which they drive or support increases in revenues, increases in efficiency and decreases in costs.

For instance, a direct correlation can be made between growth in revenues and improvements in cash flow when ICT is used to improve access to customer services. One of our clients was able to achieve substantial improvements in its cash flow and customer satisfaction by subscribing to Northpoint Consulting’s Hosted Contact Centre services, which includes multiple access channels that our client’s retail customers can use: voice, live web chat and email. Easier access and greater responsiveness afforded by our Hosted Contact Centre resulted in an improvement in the business’ bottom line (and their customer satisfaction ratings).

Another example of how ICT investments can affect profitability is deploying data, applications and services in the cloud, rather than in data centres on their own premises. On-premises ICT deployments come with operational and physical costs that are not relevant with cloud deployments. For example, with cloud implementations the following costs can be avoided: costs of regular maintenance and replacement of on-premise servers; costs of supporting hardware such as climate control, equipment racks, spare equipment; Software renewal/licensing (and over-licensing, a really pernicious issue with on-premise deployments unless the enterprise puts in place a rigorous process of tracking and optimizing license usage); the costs associated with power and data centre real estate. With cloud deployments, these variable costs are generally replaced with predictable and more easily manageable costs on a monthly subscription basis assessed on the level of cloud resources (compute, network, storage) consumed. We have helped some of the enterprises we support in the Caribbean transition to cloud services through our Data Protection Cloud service and our Disaster Recovery as a Service offerings, which provide cost-efficient data backup and application recovery environments.

Another way that enterprises can drive efficiencies and realize savings using ICT is via managed Network Operations Centre services. Remotely monitoring our clients’ networks across the Caribbean region and even in the USA provides the opportunity to mitigate the impact of performance impairments and outages on the networks and increases availability of IT services. Reduced downtime and increased availability aid business effectiveness. It also allows IT resources to be more efficiently allocated to other key operational or strategic activities.

IT and Operations Due Diligence Services

Northpoint Consulting offers bespoke technical and operational due diligence services of ICT-centric enterprises. These engagements typically would either be in support of a broader evaluation on the viability of a corporate merger & acquisition opportunity, or to develop a gap analysis on an operation’s digital services/e-services capacity and its desired future state, or even to evaluate the strategic fitness-for-purpose of a technology transformation proposal being considered by a business. The output of Northpoint Consulting’s analysis will be used to help the client decide on the viability of the investment opportunity and the risks that need to be mitigated/managed.

ICT Request for Proposal (RFP) Development & Bid Management

ICT infrastructure/service investments can be relatively costly, complex and risky. Navigating the procurement process for a critical ICT project for your business can be stressful, time-consuming and resource intensive. It can take several months or even more than a year from the time the ICT project is initially conceived and scoped to the approval of funding and then to prospecting for suppliers to deliver the approved project. In situations like this, your best option may be to outsource the process and engage RFP consulting services to develop the RFP and manage the bid process from start to finish. From RFP creation and administration to evaluation and selection, an RFP consultant helps to manage the process. Consequently, their expertise often ensures a faster process and more successful outcome.

Northpoint Consulting’s RFP consulting team focuses on ICT projects and provides expert support for managing effective RFP projects with the overall objectives of meeting the client’s requirements and protecting their investment. We work with your procurement team to guide the process from beginning to end.

From writing and formatting the RFP, managing the engagement with vendors to scoring and evaluating vendors, we provide an end-to-end service. We leverage our ICT expertise to create a clear and complete RFP. We help preselect the best vendors/suppliers to invite to participate in the RFP. Then, we manage incoming vendor/supplier questions and proposals to facilitate a clear and transparent process. Finally, we help the business evaluate the results of the RFP and provide a recommendation.

Key benefits of engaging Northpoint Consulting’s RFP consulting services include:

Centralized management of the RFP process
Unbiased due diligence on the vendor selection process
Subject Matter Expert (SME) guidance
Informed vendor decision using quantitative scoring
Assurance of best value – the highest level of service at the best price

Outsourcing of the RFP process liberates key resources to concentrate on your core

Network Assessment & Optimization

Assessment – we use advanced tools and our highly-experienced network specialists carry out inspections of equipment configuration files, network interconnection links, IP address allocations, datacentre service configuration and operational services to provide comprehensive documentation of our clients’ network environments.

Optimization – Our solutions architects and network engineers will identify where the businesses and agencies we support can make improvements to their network infrastructure and systems, recommend impartial actions for improvements, and implement those recommendations if desired.

What Makes ICT Project Management Unique?

It’s often said that a good, experienced project manager with generalist skills can manage any project well. While there is some truth to this, it is also true that there are attributes of ICT-specific projects that require an emphasis on some PM skills and capacities that non-ICT projects generally do not demand. What makes ICT project management “unique”?

One of the characteristics of ICT today is its rapid development. Advances in technology are constant, each of which can have an impact on projects that are already underway. ICT project managers are expected to keep informed of relevant technological developments that could impact the progress or success of the initiative.

The resources delivering ICT projects can be, and often are, located in different parts of the world, in widely different time zones. Mastery of building and managing a remote project team is one of the things that the ICT project manager must have in their toolkit.

Technical Implementation

Optimize your network for growth and success.

Technology leads to productivity!

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