Primary leadership role aiding a Federal Agency with implementation of a strategic plan to federate services relating to criminal alien history search, subject identification, threat prioritization, and status determination for use across the enterprise.
Accelian's Enterprise and Solution Architecture practice captures, documents, and analyzes all the services and solutions implemented to support the enterprise. These, of course, include information systems used to create, read, search, update, and delete enterprise data. In order to be useful not only from a functional mission perspective but also as an enterprise service, the systems should be linked to appropriate data elements in the Enterprise Architecture. Every system should also be linked to appropriate elements of the enterprise technology reference model.
Accelian was asked by the agency to provide support necessary to implement mission critical systems and to enable reuse of systems across the enterprise. As well as providing the solution architecture for the logical organization of information pertaining to the specific identification and apprehension of criminal aliens, we led the effort to implement an architecture that addresses the following elements in support of all enterprise-wide systems:
As a result of Accelian's Enterprise and Solutions Architecture efforts, a successful agile methodology was implemented for rapid deployment and cost effective delivery of re-usable modernized services focused on mission objective and user need that aligns to the overall strategic objectives of the agency.
The most critical success factor is the one that can have the greatest impact. In order to consistently design, develop, and implement architecture based systems and applications, a project must have a development team that uses appropriate practices and techniques.
Understanding the user's needs, writing stories before coding and keeping them up to date. Developing the User Interface real time with the users and the product owner.
Leveraging Agile techniques is an excellent start to any project, however, stakeholder sponsorship and user involvement are critical to a successful software project. The teams that will be developing and implementing the solution architecture- based software components, services, and databases must have certain characteristics. They must understand the importance of strategic information. They must be able to understand and document business requirements in business language. They must be dedicated to the project. They must have sufficient experience and access to resources. Every team member at Accelian has appropriate skills, knowledge and experience, and are very well versed with enterprise development methodologies, and are able to effectively use different technologies to engineer solutions.
Accelian personnel have played principal roles in developing and designing these types of solution using industry accepted patterns and archetypes, coupled with pure J2EE specification and open license software, targeted for and application server, including JBoss, IBM WebSphere Suite of products, Oracle Enterprise, MongoDB, and popular industry middleware. By iteratively completing sprints and moving solutions to production frequently, the needed capabilities provide product owners and their users are delivered with speed, accuracy and needed information to make critical decisions and act on information.
At a federal agency primarily concerned with the identification and apprehension of criminal aliens we did just that. After three months of development, and less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, an iterative-enterprise component was deployed to a secure infrastructure, whereby creating the foundation for full implementation 6 months later. Accelian supported the required design and development of interfaces that fed into and out of the system. We provided on-going support for all interfaces that provide data to various component and reports. The interfaces and data sources include National Crime Information Center (NCIC), Central Index System (CIS) and Computer Linked Application Information Management System 3/4 (CLAIMS) via the Person Centric Query Service (PCQS), and Enforcement Integrated Database (EID). Accelian supported all database updates to the system data store, which included all database structural changes to support system enhancements, defect discoveries, and the writing of database scripts to update or query information in the database.
Iterative implementation is not like traditional [waterfall] application development. Its scope is broader and more inclined to change, its visibility is greater, its user community is usually very eager to get a solution to the market or field, and it is used to get high valued functionality to market sooner.
In the modern world, pressure abounds from all directions to drive greater results out of fewer resources. At first, this tightrope can seem daunting, if not impossible, to achieve. However, driving more from less becomes realistic through a disciplined approach to decide what is truly important to an organization while focusing limited resources into only that which is truly important. Accelian's Strategy and Financial Management expertise solves the puzzle of doing more with less by turning organizational priorities into a shared vision that is aligned with available resources.
To best manage an organization, there needs to be a clear set of goals and objectives understood and pursued by all the members of that organization. Without a clear direction around which to coordinate efforts, the organization will begin to undergo a vicious cycle of lost focus, declining morale, and declining mission results. While Accelian finds that almost all clients have a document called a strategic plan, we have found that many still struggle to control costs, maintain workforce morale, and improve organizational results. In these cases, the available strategic plan is almost always out of date, is not integrated with other management efforts, lacks achievable objectives understood by organizational staff beyond senior leadership, and pays no heed to prioritization. In other words, among many other challenges, their organization is disconnected from its strategy.
To begin a virtuous cycle yielding improved mission results, the organization must refocus itself on achieving what is truly important within its organizational constraints. Accelian works with organizational leaders to establish a vision for the organization. As importantly, we turn to working level staff for potential tangible actions that will achieve the target vision. From these inputs, we look to build a focused set of realistic, resource-constrained objectives aligned to achieve the established strategic vision.
With a sound strategy in place, the long-term challenge to set and keep the organization moving toward its stated plan begins. First, Accelian assembles existing detailed programmatic, operational, capital, and financial plans. We then move to align and reassess these plans in light of organizational strategic priorities and operational impacts. To execute this task, Accelian places great emphasis on understanding the links between financial flows and operational success so that revisions of financial plans do not cut off important operational capabilities or create excess operational capacities not needed due to constraints in other operational areas. We then propose recommended plan changes to the client for consideration.
Once the client approves final revised detailed programmatic, operational, capital, and financial plans - Accelian next works with the client to strengthen controls that ensure adherence to plans. Further, we look to push the planning process forward in time to better project organizational results from given resources constraints. Finally, we strengthen and encourage the embedding of change management processes into core operations that encourage plans to evolve without deviating from core strategies and established budget levels. This fosters a virtuous cycle that will coordinate organizational efforts toward observable improvements in mission results.