Consulting and Advisory Services

Freeform Dynamics analysts are continuously gathering feedback from mainstream organisations in the enterprise, small/medium business and public sectors on the use of information technology in a business context. Indeed, as a team, we receive input from an average of 2-3,000 business and IT professionals a month on their experiences, challenges and ideas on everything from business cases to best practice. Together with insights into the latest developments in the industry from ongoing briefings with IT vendors, this puts our analysts in an ideal position to provide advice and guidance to those faced with making IT related decisions, not just through our community research reports, but also via the following types of advisory service:

Orientation Workshops
Designed to help teams of executives, managers and key professionals to understand how emerging ideas in technology, such as Green IT, Social Media, Mobile Working, Cloud Computing, and so on, are relevant to their business. Workshops are run by experienced analysts on a dedicated client basis and begin with a ‘level set’ briefing to ensure your team has an adequate working knowledge of key principles in the area concerned. The remainder of each workshop is then dedicated to a facilitated team discussion of potential benefits, priorities, constraints and other practicalities in your specific environment. Whether the conclusion of the exercise is to defer or proceed with adoption, you can be confident that the decision has been made in an objective and informed manner. And if you do decide move forward in the area concerned, you have a first cut plan and starting point for business case development to get you off on the right foot.

Strategy Development Workshops
If Orientation Workshops are about assessing new ideas, Strategy Development Workshops come into play once you have some experience in a particular area. It may, for example, be that you have been through a pilot or limited rollout of a particular type of solution and need guidance on what to consider as you scale up your investment and adoption. Areas in which this is typically relevant at the moment include Mobile Solutions, Virtualisation, Agile Development, and so on. Alternatively, you may be looking for an external ‘check and balance’ in an established area that is rapidly changing, such as Security, Information Management, Telecom Services, etc. Either way, workshops begin with a briefing on principles, practices and common scenarios, then move on to review where you are now, where it makes sense to get to, and, of course, how best to get there in an effective, cost efficient and low risk manner.

Procurement Support Services
One of the outputs from the above described workshops is an understanding of what’s important to you and why; a precursor to formulating plans and ultimately executing to achieve your objectives. At some point in the process, there is a good chance you will be looking to procure products and services. Based on input from market intelligence, consulting engagements, and ongoing briefings with vendors and service providers, our analysts are able to view requirements holistically and help you to identify and weight decision criteria, understand the types of vendor that are most likely to meet your needs, and even assist with the long-listing and short-listing process. Our services in this area are short, sharp and high impact, and suit those organisations who see the benefit of external independent input, but want to control the process themselves and regard the full-service RFP development and ‘hand-holding’ approach of management consultancies and larger analyst firms as overkill.

To hear more about the services described on this page, or to discuss a specific requirement, please contact us via info@freeformdynamics.com or call our Service Director, Jon Collins, on +44 1285 771 433.