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Managed Software Services |
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"Play to your strengths, and shore up your weaknesses with community," is one of
Jeff Block's (Capstone's BI Practice Director)
favorite sayings. It applies both to business and personal life. It means to identify what you're
good at, do it really well, and surround yourself with others who are really good at doing the rest.
Similarly, this is one of Capstone Consulting's guiding principles: intentionality. We do well what
we set out to do, and rely on the skill and experience of others when the task at hand is not our focus.
Capstone only takes on engagements through which we are confident we can add significant value, and we
maintain an extensive network of
partners who can help us fill in the gaps.
The founders and
practice directors
at Capstone are continually cultivating new relationships with experts in areas that are
not in the sweet spot of what we do. Examples like disaster planning and recovery, hardware
and infrastructure management, search engine optimization/marketing, and low-level third party
application configuration (such as Oracle e-Business suite) come to mind. For services like
these, Capstone would prefer our customers get the best possible service from providers who
tackle these problems every day and are experts in doing so ... just as we provide them with
the highest quality service possible in our areas of focus:
It is because we believe so strongly in this principle that Capstone offers Managed Software
Services as a part of our application development practice.
Let's face it. Globalization means that the world is shrinking and competition is intensifying.
Challenging economic times just exacerbate this reality. Capstone understands that in this
environment, IT budgets are stretched thin, competent resources are at a premium, and high-quality
technology — whether purchased or developed — is expensive to acquire and maintain. Therefore, it's
important to make sure that your best resources are devoted to high-return innovations that accelerate
your business. But even when times are great, we know you wnat to be intentional about how
you leverage the assets in your organization — whether it's your people, your processes, your
systems, or your data. Focusing those assets on the most important things first is a key part of
that intentionality.
Capstone's Application Development and Integration practice specializes in all the IT challenges you
don't want to have to worry about this year. This is because we know that both being intentional and
focusing limited resources on the most valuable things are important to our customers.
Capstone consultants are experienced in offloading support and other maintenance tasks from
our customers. Managed Software Services (MSS) provide a cost effective mechanism for outsourcing
the maintenance and support of an organization's information systems, software applications, or
technical infrastructure. This maintenance and support is a crucial part of any organization, but
can often be a distraction when resources have to be balanced between these activities and the work
of developing new and innovative solutions to move the business forward.
Your enterprise contains important – many times mission critical – applications in which are vital
to your business. However, the maintenance of these applications is time consuming and costly. Not
only are there immediate costs for monthly fees for software, hardware, network, and human resources,
but the opportunity cost is significant. Offloading software services of this nature to a professional
IT services firm like Capstone, which specializes in MSS, can significantly reduce the cost of IT by
generally increasing employee productivity and specifically focusing employee efforts.
Let's drill down a little. Beneath the core principle of "intentionality", there are a number
of concrete benefits provided by MSS.
Increased Employee Productivity
Think about your employees for a second. You are probably very proud of your employees.
Your organization works diligently to find the best possible people to fill the critical
roles within your company, whether in your IT group or otherwise. But, not only did you
choose your employees, they in turn chose your company. Why? For a job, yes, but likely
also because they believe in your company and the products and services it offers. Your
best employees want to be an important, integral part of your business and make a valuable
contribution to the products or services you provide.
Regardless of how critical to your business an information system is, your IT staff would
typically rather be building new innovative solutions than maintaining old ones. When their
skills are maximized in the creation of some new system which will increase revenues or
decrease costs, their morale and productivity are maximized, and your return on IT
investment goes up.
Focused IT Investment
Furthermore, your IT resources are limited, as we discussed above. Having carefully recruited
excited, knowledgeable resources to serve on your IT team, you are now faced with the reality
that these valuable team members can only do one thing at a time. So, you're forced to choose.
IT staff can either be providing new business functionality for your customers – translating to
needed innovation, increased margins, or competitive advantage – OR they can be performing routine
software maintenance tasks. Even if their focus is maintenance of critical systems, wouldn't
you rather use their passion and domain expertise to provide new, important business functionality
versus having them support legacy applications? When you free your employees from the day-to-day
maintenance and support of your existing enterprise, you can now leverage their very important
domain expertise to provide new, transformative value for your business. This maximizes the
return on your investment in your IT staff, and your employees become an even more important part
of your company's success.
Service Level Guarantees
A good MSS provider is careful to support their offerings by written, well-defined Service Level
Agreements (SLA). These SLAs guarantee terms of service both to you and to the end users of the
systems managed by the MSS provider. When your IT team is overtaxed, multitasking, and running
at a breakneck pace – a natural byproduct of trying to do it all with limited resources – these
levels of service are extremely hard to come by. Outsourcing maintenance and support to a provider
whose exclusive focus is on the task of maintaining your legacy software sidesteps this challenge.
Plus, a contract which includes SLAs of this nature, gives you the power to hold a service provider
accountable for the quality of service to which they have agreed in writing.
Capstone consultants are experienced in offloading support and other maintenance tasks from
our customers. Capstone's application development group offers a number of service models to
assist our customers in being intentional and focusing their resources on the most important
things first.
Software Maintenance and Support
Capstone offers 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier support of software within your enterprise. This allows
you to outsource the day-to-day maintenance and support of your applications to Capstone in a
cost effective manner. Terms for providing application enhancements are also available.
Application Hosting
By outsourcing the hosting of your application, you can further reduce the amount of time needed
by your employees to support your applications.
On Site Services
This option provides dedicated, on-site resources to maintain and support your applications,
augmenting your IT staff and freeing up your employees to focus on new functionality and technologies.
Full-lifecycle Development
Perhaps it's not the maintenance and support of legacy systems which you'd like to outsource.
Capstone can also build entire new systems (or new versions of existing systems) for your
organization. This multiplies the effectiveness of your IT staff, who can focus on one critical
set of tasks while Capstone's expert software developers focus on another.
Learn more about Capstone's Full-lifecycle Development offerings.
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