NGE Solutions

CAC - Computer Aided Consulting

Our research on computer aided consulting for IT has produced an interesting service that can deliver high quality consultation at low costs to businesses located anywhere in the world, including developing countries. This service can also be used by consultants to remotely offer consultations to any customer anywhere in the world without leaving their desks. Instead of concentrating on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that generate code, we are focusing on Integrated Consulting Environments (ICEs) that can guide the IT managers, IT planners and IT consultants to work through the difficult IT planning, integration, security and administration issues. The figure shows a conceptual ICE model:

ICE is envisioned as a service that is conducted collaboratively between consultants & customers.
Current Scenario: IT consultants and marketing professionals spend a great deal of time and effort (60 to 70%) defining the project, documenting the present method of operation (PMO) and preparing rough plans for future method of operation (FMO), based on discussions with the customers.
Proposed Scenario: the user (e.g., IT manager) defines the project (step 1) and quickly creates well documented PMO-FMO plans by using an ICE (step 2). The user then asks a consultant to review and refine the documents – this happens collaboratively between the two parties (steps 3 and 4).

Major advantage of the proposed ICE model are:
Dramatic decrease in time (about 60-70%), cost and energy (green initiative) wasted in unnecessary travels.
Enables quality consulting at affordable rates to remotely located customers in developing countries.
Increases the consulting and sales opportunities for providers without limitations of location.
Reduces the communication gaps between the participants (ICE enforces a common methodology and its GUI design allows people with limited verbal English skills to develop completely document IT plans).

This ICE, even if partially feasible, could be a disruptive technology. Firms waste millions of dollars, spend years of human capital, and consume large energy resources flying their consulting and marketing staff around.

For additional information, see our short white paper on Computer Aided Consulting for IT.

Our research and development has so far produced the following two products (one more is under construction):

PISA (Planning, Integration, Security & Administration) Environment A comprehensive computer aided consulting service for enterprise architecture and SOA issues.
GEZA (Global Entrepreneur Zone for All) An integrated portal for small to medium businesses (SMBs) that adds layers of business consulting features on top of PISA.