Our C-suite and board-level advisory services help clients define and deliver their strategic goals. Francis North’s hand-selected CxO leaders have proven experience in leading critical technology programmes for some of the world’s most innovative organisations. This experience means they can navigate complex companies and projects to find simplicity, champion the goals of a program and lead the cultural change needed to ensure the entire initiative is a success.
- CxO leadership and advisory
- Consulting on digital transformation and change projects
- Project recovery and turnaround
- Current state analysis reporting
The Francis North approach is a refreshing change for many of our clients. We’re focussed on delivering value and outcomes. Our approach delivers high-quality software at speed and scale. We’re experts at developing digital solutions and services for enterprise and SME customers.
This thorough and pragmatic methodology also considers the cultural and organisational changes needed to support the technology program. We typically introduce value-driven operating models to accelerate the performance and results of the technology deliverables.
We aim to help our clients embed a truly digital culture and to provide continuous insight and innovation so they can meet the constantly changing needs of their customers.
Services:
Digital strategy and roadmap: We’ll analyse your business challenges and goals to define a strategic roadmap to become digital ready quickly and sustainably.
Target operating model and ways of working: Organisations with a culture that supports a digital ready business model are exponentially more likely to achieve breakthrough results. We’ll define operating models and ways of working that support your technology roadmap and strategic goals and help you embed those changes.
DevOps maturity assessment: We believe DevOps is a methodology and mindset, not a physical artefact. Our maturity assessment will review current practices and map them to the fundamentals of the philosophy to produce a tangible structure that maps to your organisation’s goals.
DevOps toolchain design: The tools and systems for automation, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to enable collaboration across the SDLC require careful consideration. We’re impartial, so our recommendations will always be appropriate for your specific use.
DevOps roadmap: This detailed plan is a critical tool to help all teams support the transition to DevOps. Our approach is to include guides, such as when operations should expect to receive code for testing from development. It also ensures alignment on priorities and dependencies.
The practice of designing, developing and operating applications in the cloud is known as cloud-native engineering. This enables digital-ready organisations to respond to changing customer expectations quickly, efficiently and predictably.
DevOps
DevOps is an engineering practice that aims to reduce the development lifecycle and enable continuous delivery of high-quality software, both of which are key for digital-ready business. The focus is on empowerment, communication and collaboration to enable development and operations teams to work together in a continuous cycle. This enables more frequent software releases, automation of tasks and processes and increases the speed of development and deployment.
Cloud native modernisation
We use modern engineering practices to build or refactor legacy applications, remove technical debt and create a pathway to continuous delivery and deployment. This will accelerate an organisation’s digital ambitions, free up capacity for high-value work and enable it to move faster.
Container strategy
Containerisation is a strategy that packages software for development, shipment and deployment. It means the applications will operate quickly and reliably across environments, improving quality and reducing deployment times.
Microservices
This architecture structures applications as independent services, which improves continuous delivery. It divides the application into small and independent services which run autonomously and communicate with each other using an API.
This approach enables faster delivery and integration of other applications, lower maintenance overheads and easier code management.
We’ll create a roadmap for your successful cloud migration. We begin with a structured assessment of your organisation’s capabilities and processes and then design an approach that aligns with your commercial and strategic needs. This will ensure you realise the full benefits of using the cloud with the right technology, reduced costs and operational efficiencies.
Migrating some or all of your data centre capabilities to the cloud has a myriad of benefits including scalability, performance and cost reduction. It’s also an essential approach for digital ready business.
We plan and prioritise the migration of applications and infrastructure to minimise business disruption. And after the migration, we’ll define and introduce appropriate measures to ensure the environment is optimised so you realise the full potential of the cloud. This includes giving you full visibility on costs, performance management and security.
The security of your cloud architecture is only effective if the correct defence strategies are in place. We assess the integrity of your cloud provider’s policies to protect your data, software, infrastructure and your regulatory obligations. This helps us to create a roadmap with both strategic and tactical measures that will address any gaps we identified.
Implementing the right processes and technologies to effectively manage data throughout its lifecycle is essential to mitigate data breaches and comply with data legislation (GDPR). Evaluating the security of your data, focussing on data at rest, in use, in motion and Including encryption.
We assess the maturity and effectiveness of corporate policies Data policies, including but not limited to Data Classifications, Data Leakage, Data Protection, Data retention policies, Data Backup and Disaster Recovery.
Privilege Access Management (PAM) and Identity Access Management (IAM) are the cornerstones of a robust Identity and Access Governance (IAG) framework. We’ll conduct a gap analysis on the current security policies, controls and procedures to ensure you can execute and monitor them effectively. We also provide a range of authentication services to limit and track user access to protect your systems from malicious entities and actions.
Digital transformations have accelerated the creation and consumption of data. But if that data isn’t analysed appropriately, organisations are missing out on the ability to identify efficiencies or increase revenue. It’s an important foundation to have in place for an effective data strategy.
We’ll help you move from legacy and siloed data repositories to a dynamic architecture that gives full visibility in real-time of core business metrics. This enables you to make informed business decisions.
Data & AI Services:
Data engineering: We can design and develop applications that collect, store and analyse data at scale. We’ll also advise on the right organisational structure and capability to support those systems.
Machine learning and advanced analytics: We can design and deliver systems for predictive analytics. This requires sophisticated capability in both machine learning and analytics, real-time visibility on data and the ability to take actions quickly.
Enterprise data platforms and management: We’ll design platform that’s the single repository to unify your organisation’s data. This is the core of a good data strategy and enables sophisticated functions across the business.
Data-centric approach: The cultural change needed to support a data-first business are just as important as the technology projects that enable it. We’ve worked with many clients to successfully embed the behaviours and capabilities needed to ensure they get the best value from their data platforms.
