In many small companies, line of business managers, as well as COOs, and sometimes even CEOs are in charge of defining the requirements of an IT solution, allowing for better business alignment (in larger enterprises, this responsibility is placed with the CIO and his staff). Once the requirements are set forth, it is the responsibility of the CTO to :

1. Clearly understand the requirements and ensure that there are no ambiguities.
2. Work with the line of business manager (the project owner) to verify the assumptions being made, and that solution can achieve your business objectives.
3. Add requirements which are not immediately apparent, especially non-functional requirements, such as security and operational issues.
4. Confirm that the processes, controls and technologies chosen for the IT solution development project is viable and economical in the long-term, and above all, that it is the right choice for the company.

Kamiya Consulting’s Requirement Analysis Service is our newest service offering which will allow your company to offload these tasks in a cost effective manner. Given your requirements (don’t worry, it can be as simple as a sketch or a one-liner), our consulting team will produce a requirement document that is suitable for a RFP, and help you successful execute the RFP process.

The key to managing IT infrastructure is the economical and timely scaling of resources according to financial and service demands. Our Infrastructure Management Service allows you to make that happen. We will help you design, implement, maintain and operate an IT infrastructure that is:

1. Highly scalable, using CDNs and cloud computing services to augment physical resources as necessary.
2. Highly available, building redundancy into every aspect of the network, including applications, services, connectivity, and power.
3. Quickly recoverable, by utilizing near real-time synchronization technologies.
4. Easily manageable, with full remote management capabilities.
5. Constantly monitored, both for performance issues as well as security violations.

Without a stable infrastructure, even the best IT solutions are bound to fail, as the monetary and performance inefficiencies will break any gains that you may have made in the application logic. Give us a call, and let’s make sure you have the right footing.

The CTO’s responsibility, in terms of IT, is to ensure that the implementation, maintenance, and operation processes for all IT solutions are optimal for the business. To deliver on this promise without forcing individual stakeholders to make too many sacrifices (and therefore make them unhappy) is undeniably a tall order. Candidates and budgets that will allow businesses to hire someone for this task are hard to come by.

That is where we come in. Kamiya Consulting will provide “CTO assistance” services to your company’s CTO, CEO or line of business managers. The services will enhance the quality of IT related processes, which will better align IT investments toward achieving your business objectives.

(In some companies, the role of the CTO is handled by a VP of Engineering. The difference, as far as we are concerned, is only a formality related to the corporate governance structure in place.)

IT projects (or any project for that matter) with happy stakeholders will succeed. And vice versa: successful projects have happy stakeholders. Therefore, it is imperative to consider happiness as a key success factor in any IT project.

Happiness of IT projects is measured by:

• Contribution to each stakeholder as an individual.
• Life-work balance for each stakeholder as an individual.
• Contribution to long-term financial success of line of business.
• Contribution to society as a whole.

We will do everything within our power to ensure that these requirements are met responsibily in the projects that we are involved with.

Some of the key aspects for this are:

1. Trust and Transparency:
   We will trust all of our stakeholders, and therefore, our company, and the projects we work on, will be transparent. Information will be shared freely among all stakeholders, and every effort will be made to ensure that the information is understood. In return, every stakeholder must be diligent and make every effort to be trust worthy.
2. Respect and Ownership:
   We will respect the appropriate ownership of each aspect of the project by the stakeholders. For our customers, the project’s ownership is clearly in their hands (as well as their shareholders), and we will make sure that their long term interests are served first, and not ours. For project team members, the skills they learn and put to use are placed in balance with their careers and private life (= financial rewards), and all are treated just as importantly as the end product for the customer.

We realize that no organization can ever be perfect: the best that we can do is continue to strive for perfection. And that is a promise we make to our customers, to ourselves, and to your customers.

It is our responsibility to have a deep understanding of IT best practices and solutions, and to stay abreast of cutting edge developments in the industry. Here are some of our key skill-sets:

• A broad range of computer language experiences, ranging from light-weight scripting languages, such as PHP, Ruby, and Perl, to industrial-strength mission-critical languages, such as Java and C++. We also have experience with traditional languages such as COBOL.
• MVC frameworks for rapid development of web applications.
• Web oriented architecture
• Clustered databases
• Scalable and highly available infrastructure
• Object oriented design
• TDD, agile, SoC