SDS sponsored its own research into C-P-P over the past three years. This effort built on previous investigations and continues to benefit from new initiatives in areas related to organizational management, decision-making, policy development and terrorism.
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An important distinction between our internal and externally funded research efforts is the role, which our clients play in scoping and translating them into practice. Most of our internal initiatives were started as a result of our client's complaints over issues such as quality, costs, delays and maintenance issues.
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We shared with our clients many of these challenges and decided to commit time and resources to developing new methods, strategies and distinctions in response. This commitment began in the early 1990s, continues to this day and has delivered proven advantages in the development of management processes and information systems.
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The following is a partial list of topics, where we have and continue to focus our attention in an effort to identify new distinctions useful to our clients, who are engaged in competitive and zero-sum engagements in the markets and battlefields of the new century:
- C-P-P framework information structure and analysis methods. This is an on-going research project into developing new and improving existing frameworks,
- Decision-making within the radical islamist movement and its security implications. This is an on-going empirical study that has and continues to generate new perspectives on issues important to the war on terrorism and homeland defense,
- Accelerated data, information and knowledge systems development in customer and quality driven environments. This initiative began over a decade ago, as the impacts of greater operating systems and subsystems complexity were resulting in delays and reduced software reliability. We have delivered presentations on this topic at developers conferences and authored various papers on the subject.
SDS continues to share much of its experience and the results of its research through papers and articles in newsletters, practioner and academic journals. Please visit our web site often and check the publishing links for more detailed coverage of the topics tha we have touched on.
Delivering Value, Faster!
Since 1989, SDS has been researching methods for delivering solutions faster and with greater quality. Our research involved a variety of tools and strategies, which initially focused on rapid development of software and databases. Over the past five years, the research coallesed around a philosophy and approach that extended beyond IT and software to expert services and management consulting. Working with AC Macris Consultants, the philosophy and approach were stardized under what we refer to as the Thorough and Urgent Delivery (TUD) method. TUD delivers accelerated ROI realization through a variety of means, including:
- Ensuring that benefits accrue from the earliest possible point in the engagement process,
- Leveraging prototyping and early deployment to validate requirements and expectations,
- Employing highly productive tools in areas related to information technology and performance metrics delivery,
- Reducing costs and the ensuring effective communications between the client and SDS teams.
In practice, TUD can deliver almost immediate returns by contributing to more effective decision making, analysis and implementation.
- Rapid delivery of information driven web-centric applications. This is an on-going effort, which builds on new developments and lessons learned in the development, deployment and maintenance of web-enabled applications. Our experience with databases in general and MSSQL and Oracle in particular served as a backdrop for this initiative. This research has paid dividends in research projects focusing on terrorism and fast changing operational environments by quickly delivering functional, reliable and dynamic applications.
- Thoughtful and Urgent Delivery methodology initiative. This project built on our experiences with the Rapid Design and Delivery of software through our synergetic collaboration with AC Macris Consulting. The resulting TUD method and our on-going studies continue to pay dividends in the delivery of services tailored to each client's specific needs. See TUD on the right.
- Data to Knowledge initiative focused on strategies for defining, capturing and delivering data, information and knowledge to maximum effect. In this regard, we benefited from previous research and experiences from our colleagues in the industry. Of particular help was Managing Knowledge by Wayne Applehaus and his colleagues at JD Edwards (Addison-Wesley), whose input helped us finalize various concepts relating to the meaning of actionable knowledge from data.
- Application of Chaos Theory, Game Theory and similar analytical techniques continues to provide important lessons, which can be translated for the non-mathematician, including organizational leaders.
- Finally, we remain committed to looking beyond the single event or crisis to find patterns, which reveal important distinctions over single event perspectives. Similarly, our research continues to reference studies and expert opinion, while relying on actual measures for validation and calibration. This, we believe provides important value for our clients, our team and colleagues.
