About Us
We enable our clients to realize their business strategy by creating vital linkages between business and technology.
Who is Cogentes?
Cogentes is a business and technology consulting firm that helps organizations realize their business strategy by maximizing their investments in people, process and technology; substantially increasing shareholder value.
What do we do?
Organizations can spend extended time and effort developing their business strategies and operating models. Technology typically should play a critical role in achieving the objectives of the business. Too often, we discover serious disconnects between the business operating model and the technology operating model, and also between business and technology leaders who are expected to pursue a coordinated strategy.
Cogentes creates viable and effective linkages between business and technology strategy, as well as among business and technology leaders. This empowers those leaders to collaboratively and effectively plan, accurately predict and ultimately realize the intended results of their strategy.
How do we do this?
Cogentes consultants pay particular attention to gathering and analyzing the perspectives of senior executives, operations staff, and technology leaders at our clients’ businesses. We come to understand at a deep level how the business operating model (people, process, technology) actually functions. We compare this against industry trends and our many years of experience developing best practices as corporate IT leaders. We then help our clients chart and navigate a realistic course that guides them toward their desired destination.
Who are our consultants?
Cogentes consultants are all senior level executives and architects with successful careers in business and technology leadership positions. While we are experts at developing and executing successful technology strategies and initiatives, it is our critical thinking, creative problem solving, business domain expertise and diverse backgrounds that set us apart from other consulting firms.
Our philosophy
At Cogentes, we believe technology is a tool that should support and actuate business strategy - in other words, a means to an end. By extension, we believe the technology function for any company should empower the realization of business strategy. Too often, neither of these principles is ingrained in organizational behavior.
The technology operating model
The technology operating model of any company is comprised of its IT-related people, process and technology. For the technology function to help an organization realize its business strategy, all three elements must be focused on business goals, operationally efficient and culturally aligned.
People
When the technology function under-delivers, leaders tend to focus on technology itself as the root cause. In our experience, people-related issues are often the true root cause.
At Cogentes we typically begin a new engagement by talking to, observing, and analyzing the behavior of people in different departments - only one of which may be the IT department. These conversations help us understand how people view and use technology. When compared against conversations with IT staff, we often find:
- Unrealistic, different or unarticulated expectations - on both sides - about what technology can and should do
- Significant disconnects about the role of technology in the business
- Absence of communication and follow-through on strategic initiatives
- Confusion about ownership of results on key aspects of initiatives and
- Uncertainty about technology best practices for the industry or sector
Process
Technology is now functionally at the heart of most business processes. The ultimate promise is that technology will automate and simplify these processes. Too often, we hear complaints like:
- The system won’t let me do certain things, so I have to create a work-around.
- I have to use multiple applications during one client call because data is trapped in multiple locations.
- The technology team built this system, but it’s really not what we were looking for.
- We actually hired staff to make up for the deficiency in the systems.
Technology
When applied well, technology enables people to perform critical business processes more effectively and efficiently. At Cogentes we often find organizations struggling with technology that is:
- Inappropriate to the needs of the organization
- Over-invested and over-deployed relative to the business problems and
- Operationally inefficient with sprawling architectures that are expensive to maintain
Our solution
Cogentes has many years of experience at solving technology foundation issues. We develop strategies that:
- Unify business and technology leaders and their perspectives
- Streamline and simplify business processes
- Right-size and improve the operational performance of technology, reduce costs, and increase productivity and user satisfaction
For more information about any of our solutions, please click on the navigation links at left.
