The .NET Center of Excellence at Hanu Software Solutions

Background

Despite all the attention given to returns on IT investments, little progress has been made in linking all the elements of IT to what a business is trying to do. Managing IT investments, and demonstrating the value of IT value to a business, are more challenging than ever, and most businesses seem to be losing ground. Often, management asks CIOs to justify the very IT components that provide value to the business.

This white paper describes strategies that HSS has developed to maximize our efficiency in delivering .NET solutions to our customers.

As a software service organization, whose business itself is IT, we have learned how to align our operations on technology-centric Centers Of Excellence (COEs).

What is a COE?

The term Center of Excellence (COE) is a generic phrase used across many types of institutions, mainly in education, research, and healthcare. The IT industry picked up this phrase and started using it to define the collection of tools, resources, and skills used to perform specific development and maintenance tasks by a focused team working at a single location.

Sometimes ”COE” became more of a marketing term, with little substance behind it, for IT. This was because IT service organizations happen to be project-centric organizations with defined schedules and objectives, in contrast to other departments that may not have the vision, longevity, and resources to maintain a long-term delivery system focused along a common thread.

Making Business Sense

From the start, HSS has had a strategy of delivering value-added, cost-effective solutions to our customers on a continuous basis. As our company grew, we saw the need for a common set of processes and procedures that would allow us to create solutions quickly and leverage project knowledge across projects, so that we can deliver continuously-improving services and solutions. This need also mandated that all specialized tool sets, languages, and the knowledge of how to use them be available to our engineers in a structured and defined system, enabling our engineers to develop new solutions flexibly, faster, and at lowered costs. Enter the HSS Center of Excellence.