Strategic Thought

STS >

 Solutions by Business Goal

Strategic Thought Services has delivered a wide range of solutions to business in all types of industry sectors. Every engagement involves a specific issue tor issues that will be unique to that particular customer.

However, whilst the "problem" might be specific to a particular customer, the overriding issue is usually one of about eight technology themes that we encounter regularly.

Decision Support

Making the right long-term decisions for your business is often a significant challenge for most IT organisations. Ensuring the solution you purchase now will be effective in 5+ years time is tough to sell to a demanding board.

STS has the experience to guide organisations to make the right long-term decision and will support the resulting implementation. Technology changes are happening more quickly than ever before and taking a service based open standards approach that meets the immediate business requirements and addresses the long-term sustainability is something we have the experience to deliver.

Hosting

Many organisations strive to be the users of technology, not the providers of it. STS is seeing a growing move by customers to use software as a service rather than build, host and maintain the software.

Other customers choose to host their own systems and maintain them at a hardware and systems level. They then choose to use STS to support the applications that they have written and deployed. STS provides this service for a number of customers such as Essent and Roche.

Support

We are able to offer on-going support after any project through our dedicated support centre that provides support services for all of our products and applications. We support one of our customers (Courts Retail Plc.) through this centre throughout their 200 branches worldwide, including providing 24/7 technical resource. This same centre is responsible for supporting our 100+ blue chip Active Risk Manager and RisGen customers.

Knowledge Management

The effectiveness of you business is determined by making the right decisions, which are based on having access to the right information at the right time. A great deal of this information is held in email, physical documents, images and other business information. Capturing this content and the information contained within it, and making it available is critical to the decision making process.

Working with IBM and MS technologies STS delivers high performance information retrieval with the ability to integrate seamlessly with applications, databases and your middleware environment.

Through business process management controls your business will have the ability to route the right information to the right users in a secure way, increasing operational efficiency and improving people productivity.

People Productivity

In a changing working landscape more people are choosing to work from a range of different locations. End users no longer need to be in a specific locations to perform their daily tasks and in many instances don’t need to be connected to their intranet. 

Composite applications through portal technology with workflow can improve the performance of a business and reduce overheads. Staff perform better and are happier resulting in a much more efficient business.

Process Efficiency

This can be expanded to Process Efficiency, Control and Analysis. As Einstein said, “An intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”

Understanding what impact changes will make to business processes is not always fully understood at the beginning of a process efficiency project. During the adoption of SOA ‘is the right governance being put in place to ensure the benefits of enhancing business processes or is your business heading towards trouble without knowing it?’

Blindly making changes to individual processes without taking a broader view can lead to increased complexity that can impact business performance. Also, taking a purist approach to business process re-engineering through modelling can lead to great expense and minimal delivery rather than modelling for the specific business need.

Systems Integration

STS has delivered applications and integrated systems for almost 20 years. Our skills have evolved as the technology has, and we pride ourselves on the knowledge we have never failed to deliver a project.

Our skills are based on Java and .Net technology but we also posses the experience and knowledge of many systems and technology. Systems integration is no use on its own; integrating trading systems, new payments solution or SCM systems successfully is more dependable through the breadth of experience that STS has.

Testing

Through STS solution delivery and test services our customers can launch reliable new products and services, avoiding costly, highly visible errors.

As a leading consultancy specialising in application development in Java and .Net technologies, Strategic Thought offers in-house application testing and performance tuning services. This service can be extended to customer sites in the construction of test environments and to deliver test programmes, always with the goal of transferring all knowledge to the customer.