The Value of Program Accelerators and Why You Need Them for Your Next IT Project

Digitally transform on time and on budget with proven patterns, tools, and best practices

The world is digitally transforming

In 2023, more companies than ever are addressing their business issues with technology. This means digitally transforming operations with ERP, CRM, and modern geospatial enterprise systems to improve processes, lower costs, and sustain a competitive advantage. That might explain why IT spending is forecast to grow 9%, based on a consensus of predictions, while the 2024 revenue forecast for the Global IT market is $5.1 trillion.

Implementing major IT projects comes with cost and risk—from overlong deployment times to overspent budgets, scope creep, security risk, and lack of adoption. Navigating the various cloud technologies, flexible architectures, available APIs, AI, and other emerging technologies can be challenging for IT departments with a lack of project experience and finite resources.

This might explain why project success rates continue to falter even as global IT spending increases. Too often, investments in technology fail to achieve promised results, and projects suffer from schedule delays, increased costs, and unforeseen complexities.

But with the right experience and expertise that includes program accelerators—proven and repeatable tech patterns, best practices, and deployment tools—companies can implement modernized platforms smarter, faster, and more efficiently. By employing project-specific solutions, you ensure your major IT project is on time, on budget, and on target to deliver desired objectives and better business outcomes.

Digital transformation is difficult

While an abundance of benefits results from digital transformation and modernization, challenges can plague any IT project. That’s because most large system implementation and IT efforts require significant resources—and IT departments are typically constrained with staff dedicated to existing work.

In addition, companies must contend with how to go live with a new enterprise solution while maintaining existing applications. Keeping one system running while another goes live to reduce risk versus an actual “cutover strategy,” where one system stops as another launches, adds tremendous strain and stress. And the transition from legacy technology presents unique challenges due to the large volumes of data and systems involved.

Moreover, many organizations are integrating modern geospatial software, like Esri’s ArcGIS, as part of their modernization efforts. This presents unique considerations as well. For example, myriad ways exist to deploy the myriad of Esri’s ArcGIS tools and applications. With the proper delivery pattern, you can automate steps and reduce the time and effort required to deploy the appropriate GIS tools that support critical workflows, accelerating delivery and increasing reliability, resulting in an efficient migration to your new geospatial platform.

IT leaders are forced to grapple with tough questions, including:

  • How can I modernize without disrupting operations?
  • How do we develop a seamless, connected IT ecosystem?
  • How can I reduce complexity delivering and maintaining my enterprise GIS system?

That’s where the right program accelerators–proven patterns, reusable tools, and repeatable processes—can support the best deployments and ensure the greatest chances of success.

These accelerators help companies remove the operational inefficiency inherent in major implementations, allowing them to automate tasks, integrate applications, and accelerate time-to-value. Companies can focus more on improving and streamlining their business processes instead of deploying and implementing a new system. These accelerators give organizations time back and reduce complexity.

The benefits of Locana’s program accelerators:

  • Complete IT projects on time and on budget
  • Automate processes, workflows, and tasks – increased efficiency and reliability
  • Integrate systems, applications, and data
  • Simplify IT infrastructure deployments and data pipelines
  • Accelerate time to value

Implement faster, smarter, and with greater performance

Luckily for companies today, they can take advantage of solutions that enable projects and programs to be completed faster, with higher quality and reduced risk. Specifically, Locana has built a series of repeatable patterns, processes, and toolsets based on years of experience working with complex systems and collaboration with industry leaders—including Esri, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.

While other firms offer repeatable, fast-track options for clients based on code packages or standard toolsets, they often lack the experience and innovation expertise to tailor strategies and tools to the unique requirements of a specific organization. As a result of decades of work with GIS, ERP, program management, work management, enterprise asset management, and other systems and software, Locana’s expertise runs deep.

Locana understands diverse digital environments, data strategy, and integrations. This has led to the development of toolsets driven by the development of code that works in various IT settings. These code-based solutions focus on connecting complex legacy systems, enabling organizations to execute steps faster and more accurately.

These solutions put our clients in a position to accomplish more. Some example solutions include:

Sage

Ensure seamless integration between SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Esri with Locana’s Sage solution. It produces synchronization between databases to geo-enable existing business platforms. Sage configurations take advantage of industry-proven products to provide real-time analytics while supporting data needs with GIS embedded natively. It enables map-based apps and workflows that use GIS and business data in real time.

CARMEN

Carmen accelerates data migration using a collection of scripts and approaches that support the entire process, including UN migrations. Companies can improve data assessment and rule-building for topology, network connectivity, and more. They can enhance migration through schema mapping and data transformation, validation for attributes like geometry and equipment type, and issue resolution discrepancies, snapping, and other items.

Esri DevOps toolkit

Locana’s developed codebase makes it easy to publish Esri software, data, services, and configurations from one environment to another. Organizations can move an entire Esri environment from development to testing, quality assurance, and production. These toolsets support stand-alone delivery automation and implementation with existing DevOps pipelines, boosting investments in operational development.

Schedule protector

For clients using Oracle’s P6 schedule manager, this Locana toolset helps back up schedules, which cannot be done with the base software. People can compare P6 enterprise data within an XML/XER project file against a P6 cloud database. The schedule protector tool helps avoid errors when importing third-party, stand-alone, or other projects into Oracle Primavera P6. It recognizes enterprise data within a project, then highlights if the data matches, has no matches, or matches with different rates (e.g., currencies).

In addition to program accelerators, Locana maintains numerous best practices that also aid in successful project implementations.

For example, by using a dedicated scrum master, companies can improve their development speed and quality with continuous communication. The dedicated scrum master removes blockers and non-core tasks from the build team. This reduces confusion and ensures timely decision-making. It also improves quality assurance by allowing the technical experts to focus on their assignments rather than secondary tasks and status reporting.

In addition, organizations can identify a dedicated lead to facilitate the selection process of specific software, services, and applications. This ensures a single point of contact that manages requirements, vendors, and stakeholders.

Gain value with program accelerators

While most companies want to upgrade their IT infrastructure and platforms, the challenges can prove costly and time-consuming. Program accelerators—repeatable toolsets, patterns, and best practices—offer faster, more efficient methodologies. Companies can gain rapid time to value through integration, data automation, synchronization, quality assurance, testing, and production.

The Locana team has a track record of success deploying program accelerators built on applied experience and innovation. For decades, we’ve helped customers digitally transform and modernize their IT systems and solutions because we listen, learn, and collaborate closely on every engagement. Locana’s success in partnering with clients to take the lessons learned and best practices from each project and codify them into solutions you can use today.

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Want to learn more? Visit our program accelerators and services pages today.

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