Architectural Process...

Our innovative approach provides key benefits to your enterprise. By separating infrastructure requirements from functionality, we can help your organization quickly identify the key business requirements of the application. Thanks to our experience in delivering complex projects for large enterprises, we have the knowledge to quickly identify which factors are the most critical in shaping your new applications. Once those requirements are in place, we can devise a system design that will faithfully support your business needs.

Define the IT vision, objectives and principles: Initiates the IT enterprise architecture by establishing the process, teams and budget. Strategic drivers are reviewed and developed, and a business context diagram is constructed to align the IT architecture with strategic plan and mission.

Consider Views: This phase demonstrates, architecturally, where the organization is currently situated. The baseline characterization results in a picture of the existing architecture along its four views: work and location, information sets, applications, and technology infrastructure.

Create the IT target architecture: This is the heart of the process. The four views of the IT enterprise architecture are modeled in terms of a desirable target architecture. The process consists of defining the architectural components and the relationships between them. The result is an organized set of definitions and models that reflect the different views of the architecture.

Select services and future opportunities and perform a gap analysis: This phase moves the architecture out of the conceptual world into one where the practical realities govern implementation. In this step, short-term immediate opportunities are identified which, once implemented, can demonstrate the value of the IT architecture and provide immediate benefits.

Confirm business objectives: This phase links the current reality with the desirability of the target architecture by establishing one or more plateaus representing practical migration stages, defined as short-, medium- and long-range objectives and priorities. Projects identified in the previous steps are prioritized over time, based on inter-project dependencies and cost/benefit analyses.

Implement the IT target architecture: This phase implements the first plateau of the migration effort. It constitutes the first wave of projects that establish the groundwork for each successive plateau of the target architecture implementation.

Continuously review and update IT enterprise architecture: This phase addresses how to keep the architecture alive and well by continuously adjusting the EA decisions in accordance with unforeseen changes in business directions or in technology advances or its availability.

Thinksol relies on processes to consistently deliver high quality solutions while executing a growing number of engagements from multiple locations. Values, vision and policies form the first level of our three-tiered process architecture. They are implemented through process execution at the next level. These processes are defined with clear ownership using the ETVX (Entry, Task, Verification, Exit) paradigm and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Quality System Documentation

Quality System Documentation is a collection of our generic best practices in the form of processes. The QSD provides our engineers and consultations with a vast repository of detailed procedures, templates, standards, guidelines and checklists.

The comprehensiveness of QSD supports all tasks from higher-level information abstraction and definition to tasks such as coding and documentation. This is crucial to assure clients of high quality and predictable IT solutions that meet their business needs. The QSD is updated and released every four months and made available on every desktop through the Intranet. Knowledge Manual

Thinksol's Knowledge Manual is a forum for Thinksol brains to share knowledge gained from their experience at Thinksol. It is meant to be a central repository of experiential knowledge that can be tapped by peers and other engagements at Thinksol. The collection of documents in the Knowledge Manual is reviewed and classified into different areas:

• Software life-cycle activities such as requirements specification, design, build and testing.



• Software-related topics such as tools, engagement initiation and quality.



• Topics of general or operational interest such as travel or people policies, etc.



• Process Assets

• To aid estimation of effort and defects



• To get the productivity and quality data on different types of projects



• To aid in creating process capability baselines



• Process Capability Baseline (PCB)

• Standardization of tools usage



• Ensure evaluated technologies are transferred into normal practice across the organization



• Identify and evaluate new technologies on a continuous basis to determine their benefits