Our Approach
Thinkwise is a team led by deeply experienced IT & business professionals. We focus on two key data center areas, namely: Cloud Enablement with Cyber Resilience and Disaster Recovery as the foundations to any Digital Transformation and IT Modernization journey. We also have experts focused specifically on raising customer experiences and employee productivity with cloud based communications, collaboration, decisioning dashboards and automated workflows as outlined on thinkwise.work.
Within the data center focused areas, we facilitate comprehensive end-to-end solutions, encompassing discovery & assessments, strategies & architectures, design & build (migrate where appropriate), and operations & governance as outlined below.
Our senior advisors will work with you throughout the full cycle of solutioning, ensuring high quality and mentoring your teams.
The “A” Team - our Principal Advisors & Consultants will stay with you for the entire journey, from strategy, to implementation and migrations, to operations and governance. Having worked for / with many major VARs, manufacturers and consulting firms, we have witnessed the “A Team” of highly skilled resources used to sell business, and then swapped out for the “C or D Teams” to deliver - leaving clients less than satisfied. The Principals at Thinkwise remain involved and accountable for all aspect of our work, focused on ensuring high quality and your satisfaction - period!
Client and Thinkwise Match - we truly seek a Win-Win scenario with our clients and partners always! Access to decision makers, collaboration, transparency, a good pace, and a willingness to work hard combine for successful engagements.
Holistic Vision - along with our deep knowledge and experience in technology, we understand that for technology to work, people and process have to be considered and addressed to ensure viability, value, sustainment, and security.
Modernization Focus - we quickly discover and assess what your organization needs and translate that into requirements, modern tools, techniques and governance in support of your organization’s vision.
Cloud Expertise - we know how to justify (via business case) your move to cloud, and provide the design and migration skills to make it happen. We come from a disciplined IT infrastructure world and leverage that knowledge to safely and efficiently move your data, applications, and services to cloud.
Resiliency & Recovery Expertise - we specialize in architecting and implementing the tools, techniques and processes to ensure your critical systems and data meet your availability and disaster recovery needs (including ransomware).
Mentor Leadership Approach – we work with your teams to evolve and develop their skills and capabilities required to support hybrid cloud solutions and disaster recovery effectively.
Long Term Leadership & Support - we help clients mature and evolve over time, often providing services after main projects are completed, leveraging the deep knowledge and insights we have gained to support your organization to continually improve.
It is critical to the success of any project to have a clear and common understanding of where we are now and where we want to be in the future. Clarity and transparency make for successful engagements.
Discovery & Assessments
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Discovery includes gaining a clear understanding of the requirements & objectives, current state, constraints, assumptions, risks and any other information needed to ensure client satisfaction and a successful engagement. A variety of tools and techniques are used, depending on the nature of the project, including:
Discovery workshops & interviews
Review existing documentation & reports
Tools to gather technical data, inventory, configurations, etc.
Questionnaires & forms
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Info-Tech Diagnostics quickly provide deep insights and teams’ perspectives on a variety of topics with minimal effort. These are proven automated surveys that produce executive / boardroom ready reports along with underlying data and details for deep analysis. Thinkwise uses the diagnostics as a discovery tool, and to produce a baseline against which future diagnostics are compared - these measurement help show progress and improvements over time.
Click on links below to see samples:
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Collecting the discovery and diagnostics information is the easier part of engagements. Assessments is where the real work begins leveraging our past experiences and applying it to the situation at hand to set direction and recommendations to future strategies, design, operations and governance:
Current state SWOT analysis
Refined solution requirements
Potential options
Recommendations
A clear vision is critical to embarking on any major initiative. Building on discovery, we work with you to create viable strategies to define the changes needed to achieve your goals. We will architect solutions to enable the strategy, bridging the gap from business to technical aspects, and ensuring seamless integration from operations to governance. A holistic architecture includes the means to sustain solutions over time.
Strategy & Architecture
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Thinkwise has extensive experience with creating strategies, including:
Full IT Strategies
Cloud Adoption & Migration
IT & Cyber Resiliency
Cyber Recovery
Disaster Recovery
Strategies can include a variety of information at varying levels of detail. We will tailor work to address your specific needs and desired focus areas such as technology, process, tools, cost, organizational structures, and more…
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Architecture can be included as part of a strategy or can be created as a standalone engagement. Again, depending on your needs, we have extensive experience including:
Enterprise & Business Architecture
Solution Architecture
Technology Architecture
Resiliency Architecture
Cyber Recovery Architecture
Disaster Recovery Architecture
Design & Deploy includes the detailed designs, plans, and hands-on work required for strategies and architectures to come to fruition. Our senior technologists are experienced with working in mission critical and live production environments, maintaining a mature “do no harm” approach to perform builds and migrations.
Our senior advisory team stays involved throughout the engagement - a core principle of how Thinkwise works. We remain accountable for the entire scope of any project delivery, ensuring work is performed to high standards and quality that align with the defined vision, strategy and architecture.
Design & Deploy
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Our experienced technical team will create and document the detailed designs of the solution, using standard document and artifact creation tools like Wiki, Visio, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc., as appropriate. Design includes any plans, tools, techniques to perform the work in a safe and efficient manner.
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Deploy includes work like new implementation builds, upgrades, migrations, or decommissioning. Our deployments, regardless of nature or scope, will be documented prior to implementation and include as-built documents for training, knowledge transfer, operations and sustainment, as appropriate.
Our teams have extensive experience across a broad set of clients and technologies. We encourage your teams to work with ours if possible, as we see mentoring as such an important yet underserved discipline.
Thinkwise understands the importance of operations and governance in IT. Although we are not a managed services provider, nor an audit / governance organization, we do advise on these areas and include them as part of our strategies and architectures. With the extreme growth in IT over the years, modern operating and governance tools and techniques are required to keep IT functioning, secure and in compliance. Our advisors have deep experience in these areas and bring them to our strategies and architectures.
Operate & Govern
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The sheer volume and quantity of “things” operated and managed by IT requires modern tools and techniques. This space is experiencing constant growth and expansion, including most recently the use of AI. Whether you plan to manage and operate your infrastructure in-house, via MSP, or hybrid approach, we can guide and direct you to maturing your IT operations through automation.
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The IT and data governance domains are experiencing ever increasing demands and expectations. Organizations GRC teams re struggling to address the legal, regulatory and corporate demands of governance. Thinkwise has helped our clients modernize their governance approaches, particularly with respect to cloud management, disaster recovery and cyber resilience. Using modern tools and cloud constructs enables organizations to deliver the level of transparency and controls required, via automation, orchestration and real-time reporting dashboards.