Business Integration Consultancy Programme

Businesses, whether public or private, work better if they partner effectively with other organisations. Information is shared, enabling all parties involved in service delivery to have a 360 degree view of customer or client. Decisions can then be made on an informed basis, and where necessary, involved organisations can co-ordinate activities to enhance outcomes and reduce costs.

While the benefits of this form of collaboration are clear, many organisations find it difficult, if not impossible to realise them due to a number of barriers:

  Organisational

Internal policies and practises currently prevent sharing of information with outside organisations.

  Process

Current processes for sharing information are based on manual processes, which are often informal or ad-hoc. These are both costly and time consumming to execute, often resulting in information requests being fulfilled after the event.

  Technology

There is no technology infrastructure in place that allows the controlled sharing of information with partner organisations. In many cases there are no linkages internally between front and back office system, limiting the benefits that can be achieved through external integration.

InMezzo has extensive expertise in these areas, combined with comprehensive skills and real world experience in collaboration policy, process, and service orientated architecture and other integration technology frameworks.

In addition InMezzo’s and partner organisation’s products provide a sound base for the implementation of practical technical collaboration solutions.

To effectively counter this situation, InMezzo focuses on helping user organisations to create a set of business practises and policies which support information sharing. These are then implemented through a combination of business processes and business collaboration technology, to provide an integrated business service.

Our role starts by identifying the key business objectives, management requirements and associated metrics for the collaboration. These are mapped into the InMezzo business collaboration framework, establishing the high level principles, requirements and acceptance criteria for the final solution.

InMezzo’s methodology adopts a four phase approach to the delivery of business collaboration solutions:

  1.Business Integration Requirement Analysis

  2.Business Case Development

  3.Solution Design

  4.Development, Test and Deployment of the Design

  This pragmatic approach ensures the delivery of cost effective business collaboration solutions.

Our expertise is aimed at preparing your organisation for leveraging the benefits of business collaboration through a four stage process:

Business Integration Requirement Analysis

Identify key business integration and collaboration objectives and gathering associated business requirements. Carrying out detailed analysis of the requirements to identify key business compenents which are then articulated in a business architectural specification (often called functionality specification).

At this stage an audit of current policy, process and technical infrastructures is carried out to identify capability gaps and barriers to execution.

Business Case for Action

This provides an overview of the proposed solution and outlines the policy, process, and IT workpackages that will need to be executed in order to deliver it. Risks and issues are identified and mitigating actions described. An overall project plan is provided, detailing roles and responsibilities.

In addition to detailing IT packages, the plan will cover business readiness activities and workpackages. These are designed to ensure that the organisations can take full advantage of the solution once implemented.

Design the Solution

InMezzo in conjunction with identified individuals within the customer’s organisation, will developed a detailed design specification for the solution. This will examine the different options identified for workpackages and provide a rationale for the design decisions made. In many cases this will be determining whether or not controls are best implemented through process or technological means.

An integral part of the design is the development of detailed use cases covering key elements of functionality. These will form the base of the test and acceptance specification for the overall solution.

The output of this phase is:

•Solution Architecture

•Collaboration Policy Framework Specification

•Collaboration Process Framework Specification

•Technical Design Specification

•Collaboration Solution System Integration Test Specification

•Collaboration User Acceptance Test Specification

Engineer the Development, Test and Deployment

InMezzo will also provide project support to management for the build of the final system, if required, with selection of hardware and software and of system integrators as needed. An initial conceptual model may be built to show the working system, before embarking on development, test and final deployment.

InMezzo’s extensive expertise and experience in business integration combined with InMezzo’s and partner business collaboration products provide a comprehensive delivery capability. This coupled with a customer and delivery focused culture, provides a high level of assurance of success and ultimate return.

Policy & Identity Management Solutions