The iFish Group (IFG) provides Information Technology strategy and consulting services to drive and expedite successful business outcomes.

We believe that technology has the power to change the ways that citizens access government services and can have a positive impact on the value and benefits that they receive. Bringing people together to share ideas, knowledge, experience, and inspiration helps them to achieve better outcomes for their missions.

Strategy

IFG focuses on providing strategic methodologies and practices that lead to informed decision making, improved outcomes, and lower risk. Strategy forms the basis of how organizations align their actions with business goals and help to shape their future. We believe that an organization that is poised to be responsive to changes can maximize the benefits and value of its investment in technology, processes, and people. And, that organizations can learn from how the future unfolds to further shape their beliefs and choices and to thrive in an environment of uncertainty and doubt.

Strategic Planning
IFG offers services from the initial assessment, planning, and strategy development, through developing a roadmap and implementation plan. The process for developing an effective strategic plan starts with identifying the business drivers that are important to your organization and establishing outcomes that align your technology initiatives with measurable benefit.

Business Agility
In a world where technology innovation brings complexity and sustainability concerns, a Business Agility strategy can help to cultivate capabilities that will ensure that your organization can not only deliver, but also sustain, measurable business value. Alignment of IT and business strategy, managed through appropriate corporate governance, leads to more adaptable technology throughout the organization, therefore facilitating an agile business strategy.

Application Security and Governance Strategy
IFG has developed and tested a robust information Application Security and Architecture Governance framework with supporting methodologies to generate your organization’s comprehensive, highly actionable, and measurable security strategy and roadmap. IFG’s security framework combines Identity Management, Privileged Access, and API Management objectives and aligns them with NIST SP 800-53 critical security controls to ensure that all areas of security are considered, covered, and reported upon. To ensure that the security strategy is built in alignment with and supportive of enterprise and IT strategies and plans, we provide checklists, tools, and processes to gather requirements across the organization, key stakeholders, customers, regulators, and other parties. IFG’s tested and proven rationalization and prioritization methodologies ensure that the strategy is not only the one the organization needs, but also the one the organization can support.

Consulting

At IFG, we champion a more agile work approach for State and local government. The next generation of government is government agility – client-focused, outcome-aligned, organized, and structured for empowered teams; and managed by agile leaders.

Coaching and Project Management
Individuals are at the center of high-performing teams. Whether at an executive leadership, business unit, team, or individual level, coaching and mentoring helps to develop skills and experience required for success. When adopting agile practices, knowing how and where to start can be a challenge for even the most experienced teams.

Custom Software Development, Delivery, and Maintenance
Traditional software development projects face client scrutiny as not delivering on promises or keeping up with the rapidly changing technology landscape. Multi-year projects introduce the risk that technology chosen today may become obsolete or lag behind industry leaders by the time it is implemented, quickly becoming the source of “technical debt.” Shifting your organizational strategies and processes from a primarily Waterfall-driven approach to a more Agile one requires thoughtful strategies and approaches to help your organization manage and sustain the change.

Leveraging Agile methodologies provides the flexibility to address change but also requires consistent structured communication between business, technical, development, and operational resources.

DevOps / SecDevOps, and Automated Testing
Using best practices from technology leaders including AWS, Docker, Hashicorp, and Google, IFG helps our clients develop capabilities that provide economies of scale and supportability. Adjusting your development practices and process to support modern approaches to design, build, and deploy your software solutions can inadvertently saddle your organization with technical debt due to unsuccessful trial and error of various methods and tools.

Application Security
Whether private or public sector, business is built on trust. This trust is based upon a foundation of both protecting the data assets a company or department has while enabling users to easily conduct business. This trust can be quickly eroded due to a security breach. Deploying application security software is often used to prevent and/or identify these breaches. However, this approach all too often only addresses the symptom(s) and not the root cause. A comprehensive security program that addresses the key components of people, processes, and technology enables companies and departments the ability to protect data assets while conducting business and in the event of a breach quickly remediate.

Performance Monitoring
Organizations often fall into the trap of focusing so intensely on content and capabilities for their applications that they neglect one of the areas that is most important to the audience: Performance. Application performance needs to be a priority while maintaining a fast-updating development environment. Continuous Performance testing and monitoring in an agile environment is the best way to ensure application performance with quicker development cycles. Balancing agile and DevOps velocity with the need for ongoing performance testing and monitoring is essential. Business Agility designs, delivers, and supports robust, scalable, technical solutions.

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Get started with IFG Strategy and Consulting by getting in touch with Frank Ono.

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