Pararray has accumulated a myriad of experience with a huge variety of systems, platforms, software, and hardware. Over each of the main personnel’s careers, we individually explored different industries, working in healthcare IT, news production, financial services, government contracting, nonprofit and charity work, as well as purely technical careers such as technical infrastructure management, information sciences. Each sector of the economy has its own domain knowledge, policies, procedures, and problems; however they have all converged on information technology in one way or another.
While working in these disparate industries, several overarching trends became obvious:
- Decision makers need timely and accurate information
- Security is never considered
- Testing is often dangerously neglected
- Complex problems are often the result of a complex solution to another problem
Pararray’s experience covers many functional areas related to information technology, solution development, business process analysis, and training. The following Seaport-e functional areas are covered below.
System Design Documentation and Technical Data Support
Pararray has the expertise to with Software Engineering to prepare and assure detailed technical data documentation reflects the latest design, configuration, integration, and installation concepts. System documentation is a core component of our development process, and throughout evaluation, implementation, and testing, the documentation is drafted and formalized. Pararray also has the technical capabilities to review and document existing information technology systems.
Software Engineering, Development, Programming, and Network Support
Pararray’s vendor-agnostic position provides the perfect vantage point to evaluate the needs of an organization, determine the best course of action, and execute.
a. Evaluation of Intended Use and Functional Need
When a new system need arises, Pararray first evaluates the need in terms of the organization. Very different types of systems may be desired to fulfill a need, often because these systems are superficially similar. For example, publishing information to a large group of people is a relatively common task for an information technology system to handle. The obvious approach is to set up a web site to provide this information. When the developer starts to secure and provide access controls for the system, if it’s a simple, static, web site, the developer will need to start creating .htaccess files in every secure location, and manage the users and access for every person. This would fit the needs, but at the cost of a lot of developer time to simply keep the pages updated and secured. On the other hand, knowing the security requirements ahead of time, a developer would choose a platform that provides a security framework that is easier to manage. Rather than building a new authentication mechanism, Pararray would integrate with an existing authentication mechanism and distributes access control to a set of managing users to add and remove people from resources. This up-front investment would pay off very quickly.
b. Off-the-Shelf Software
Many difficulties faced by business and government organizations are similar enough that they’ve been solved by a software developer who has created a product. The classic examples of this are Microsoft’s Office applications and server-based services, where each time a new version is released, the client licenses the software for a certain number of devices or users, and the only remaining cost is support if required.
c. Hosted Software and Managed Services
Services like email were previously distributed among thousands of organizations all over the world, where each one ran their own server. The recent trend is to outsource this service to Microsoft or Google to host the content on their servers, which reduces cost but also reduces control and confidentiality. Large organizations, or those that require HIPAA, PCI, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, need to exercise more care. For national security concerns, this is amplified further. The government’s consolidation of datacenters which is under way is a good way to recover some efficiency when using commercial cloud offerings isn’t an option. Pararray considers hosted software or managed services in the buy/build evaluation where appropriate however we anticipate security and confidentiality requirements as necessary.
d. Custom Software Development
When starting this sort of engagement, having a notional scope and rough order of magnitude for the budget establishes a lot of the framework for the project. Does the anticipated outcome reduce the various burdens on enough of the organization’s resources to justify the expense? Should an organization hire expensive consultants to build a system that reduces 20,000 employees’ time spent on overhead activities by just 30 minutes per month? That solution has saved that company over 400 man-days that would have been used by the old process. It’s probably a great way to improve efficiency, although if the development effort lasts twenty years and costs twenty billion dollars, it’s not likely to be worth the expense.
If custom development is the selected path forward, Pararray will use the functional requirements of the system and organizational policy requirements for the users and information to determine the best platform and architecture. The early decisions are of great importance and will have a lasting impact on the software until it is decommissioned.
e. Development Project Management and Operations Procedures
For project oversight and collaboration, there is a core set of procedures that Pararray uses consistently and an array of software tools to facilitate and guide the team efficiently. These tools vary depending on the team and platform, but the following is an example for a large scale Java application.
The tooling ecosystem is continuously evolving and improving, but includes:
- Elastisearch, Logstash, Kibana (for monitoring)
- Vagrant and Packer for virtual development environments
- Ansible, Chef, and others for configuration management
- Powershell and Bash scripts
Information System (IS) Development, Information Assurance (IA), and Information Technology (IT) Support
Pararray has mature support processes and procedures that apply to the areas of information system development, information assurance, and information technology. The combined goal of these is to provide uninterrupted, high quality service to the end users of an information system. The following subsections will discuss the depth and breadth of Pararray’s offerings related to supporting each type of activity.
a. Information Systems (IS) Development Support
Pararray supports development activities by providing security reviews, automation and orchestration recommendations, and development operations implementation support.
b. Information Assurance (IA) Support
The main goal of Information Assurance is to mitigate the risk of loss associated with strong security policies to assure the information remain safe, secure, and available in the event of a disaster. Pararray’s depth of knowledge in the realm of security includes securing information systems from not only external human threats, but also natural and internal threats. During the design phase of the development process, engaging security and information assurance experts provides the best chance of developing a securely implemented feature on the first attempt.
c. Information Technology (IT) Support
Pararray has deep roots in IT support for various types and sizes of organizations. Troubleshooting and debugging are where we started our careers, learning the patterns for device, software, and user issues. Pararray’s current expertise and knowledge are now applied to organizations to change the types of support they engage in rather than fixing broken devices.
We perform an analysis of the existing IT infrastructure and services, create a plan to implement the needed automation and monitoring tools. The evaluation starts similarly to the SDLC process where Pararray investigates the needs of the organization. Logging and monitoring are added to the infrastructure to glean important insights. Based on the collected information, Pararray will provide recommendations for infrastructure investment, helpdesk services, outsourcing, and continuing process improvements.
Training Support
The success of new processes and implementations relies on end user adoption. Pararray has extensive experience planning for organizational change management as part of new technology rollouts. Organizational Change Management (OCM) is the process, driven by leadership, of preparing the people in an organization to transition from an old way of doing something to a new one. As part of any implementation, we create a Communication Plan for managing the change and training target audiences. The purpose is for creating awareness in the impacted community to ease the staff through the transition. The objective is a successful implementation that provides value to the individuals working with the new processes and/or tools and increases effectiveness of the organization.
A clear, well communicated mission and vision gives staff clear objectives to work towards and an understanding of their role. Communicating the message to targeted audiences using the most effective medium, for example, presentation, online training or on the job training designed to increase individual sense of ownership which leads to greater adoption of the tool and greater productivity.