Strategic Consulting Service
When it comes to project level consulting, such as application design or platform deployment, there’s a wide array of analysts and consultants who can step in and provide assistance. In fact, Vicorp has been providing these types of professional services for over two and a half decades.
But what options are available when your needs aren’t tactical but more transformative?
Historically, your option was to retain a large consulting firm that would charge hundreds of thousands of dollars and spend six months to create a 65 page report (that was mostly recycled filler anyway) with recommendations that will take years to take action upon.
Vicorp Strategic Consulting Service was created to help enterprises, carriers and service providers who have the need for an outside party to assist in the creation or validation of strategic initiatives.
What is a strategic initiative?
Strategic initiatives are those which will have wide ranging impact on the way a company (or a division) does business. Some examples of strategic initiatives include:
- Migration Projects - working with enterprises/carriers to develop a rational, achievable strategy for migrating from one architecture to another. Classic migration include:
- Implementing SOA - taking a hard look at internal resources and initial piece-mail projects so the company can build a logical plan for migration to a services oriented architecture.
- AIN to IMS - a critical project for any carrier, working with carriers and service providers to understand and justify the migration from classic intelligent network architectures to the SIP-Centric IP Multimedia Subsystem.
- Enterprise VoIP - though cost control is a compelling reason in itself for considering implementing VoIP in the enterprise, understanding the new possibilities available with a SIP implementation can show far more benefit.
- IVR to VoiceXML - for the thousands of applications and hundreds of thousands of applications built on End of Life legacy IVR platforms, building a strategy that works for your company is the key to a successful migration. Application level migration services can be easily transitioned to Vicorp’s Professional Services team.
- Customer Contact - allowing customers a variety of contact methods is key for reducing customer churn. The group will work with enterprises on a number of initiatives:
- Working through the customer experience and finding key points for improvement, ranging from agent scripting to web page presentation.
- Building plans for increasing customer contact modalities, including: voice self service, web, CTI and assisted service, WAP/3G mobile, chat/IM and email.
- Evaluating existing technology, capacity and staffing plan.
- Biometrics and Security - government and financial sector self service applications are increasingly under legislation to increase data security. The strategic services group has expertise in:
- Biometrics - simply implementing a biometric engine isn’t enough to provide security - learning about biometrics and the best processes for implementation and testing is critical for achieving results. Our team has conducted primary research on voice, fingerprint and other biometric methods.
- Strong Authentication - There are alternatives to biometrics for securing applications, such as knowledge based authentication, one-time pins and secure tokens. Understanding the options can save companies headaches and money.
- Identity Management - from ActiveDirectory to OpenID, there are a number of identity management methods available to enterprises. Understanding which works best for your environment is important before setting off on implementing secure applications.
- Enrollment Strategies - the part of the process that most commonly falls apart. Implementing a secure application is one thing, getting the users enrolled into the system in a manner that is both palatable to the customer but still strict enough to remove the ability for false registration is critical.
To stay nimble and effective, our projects typically range from 1-3 months - though projects can run into the years depending on the enterprise needs. Instead of writing long format reports, we prefer a more interactive model - presenting our findings and supplying shorter format, hard hitting supplementary documentation. Typical projects include:
- Internal Whitepaper Development - to validate internal strategies and educate companies on new technologies
- SWOT Analyses - determining how solutions (or companies) stand up against each other
- Product/Service Requirement Documentation - working with carriers and service providers to draft comprehensive product or service requirement documents which can then be used for internal development or outsourcing
- Vendor Selection/RFP - from choosing a short list of vendors, creating RFPs and even providing result analysis, our extensive history working with most vendors in the real time communication ecosystem can help fast track what can be an extremely time consuming part of a migration project
