Tech Specs

Our 5 Principles with Digital Platform Construction

Incus5 is a software development and integration company dedicated to designing and implementing successful Digital Transformations for businesses. We do this by building Digital Platforms for customers, partners, and employees that create seamless self-service user experiences, with the end goals being to lower costs, improve user experience and vastly increase scalability.

A successful digital platform delivers alignment to the business, a higher utility of assets, an elevated degree of data security, the perfected user experience, and often a decrease in technical debt. The appeal of our digital platform is its ability to run a business process from end-to-end, allowing your business to grow.

1 – ALIGN TO BEST SERVE YOUR BUSINESS

Knowing what both your customers and your senior management want—and validating that direction with real data early in the process—ensures your digital platform is in proper alignment with your business. Good alignment accelerates the process and focuses development efforts on what is important. Conversely, if the solution design and architecture are wrong, your transformation will fail.

2 – INTEGRATE TO DIFFERENTIATE

Digital Transformation requires building digital platforms that are powerful and easy to use. The power of these platforms comes from aggregating the functionality of your most important existing systems and new innovative systems that are being published daily. Ease of use comes from providing a shared context across these systems that is aligned with your business objectives. The Amazon Shopping app is a great example of this, as it brings information from many systems into one single powerful UI, which is uniquely designed just for shopping. Creating platforms that bring together functionality from applications you already own and like will create a foundation for all subsequent activities. This includes SaaS (Cloud Hosted), COTS, and custom applications.

3 – ELEVATE USER EXPERIENCES

The major goal of a Digital Platform is to create a seamless self-serve user experience. A business necessity can interrupt this experience with a step or process that requires a real person. But once this condition is resolved, the user experience should continue and be connected back to the Digital Platform. 

A user experience can be damaged by:

• Having more steps than necessary
• Disjointed solutions caused by poor integrations

4 – CREATE A DATA-DRIVEN BUSINESS

Data can be the single most important element in differentiating your business from your competition. Gaining a competitive edge in your industry is possible when you manage and leverage that data properly. Businesses must navigate through the maturity model by how they acquire, persist, and use their data, using both traditional decision support systems (i.e. data warehouses) and advanced use cases, such as Deep Learning and AI.

 5 – RETIRE TECHNICAL DEBT

Every application that is added to your portfolio creates a bevy of operating expenses. Some expenses are obvious, such as 20% software maintenance. But others are less obvious but equally crippling expenses, such as: administration, security, DR, backup, and compliance. Applications must be retired to make room for better solutions and accommodate new business objectives. Our Incus5 methodology provides an efficient way to remove these applications at a lower cost.

HOW WE WORK

We oftentimes look at Digital Transformation as a series of Digital projects with a unifying architecture and approach.  The goal being to provide ROI for each project.  Often this projects our single process automation projects where we combine the data, applications, and people processes together with our digital products so we can build a simple easy to use user interface that allow the process to be accomplished simply.  Other times the project is to build a portal for customer service or a “One Stop” for partner led work.

Either way we divide work into three major phases. Our first phase is Discovery, which helps us understand your business, your current technology environment and your business obstacles and objectives.  Our second phase is our Rapid Validation and Design Spring and is optional if you need to build an MVP to validate an idea or get executive sponsorship.  Finally, our last phase is the Digital Platform Construction & Custom Application Development work.

Our development approach utilizes a customized Domain Driven Design methodology, featuring cloud native, full stack development. We are well versed in building 12-factor applications using microservices, and modern data management patterns.

DISCOVERY

Discovery helps us understand your business, your current technology environment and your business obstacles and objectives.  This is usually accomplished by a review of customer documentations, working session and client interviews.

RAPID VALIDATION & DESIGN SPRINT (RVDS)

Rapid Validation & Design Sprint (RVDS) is a prescriptive, two-week process dedicated to defining our goals, making decisions, and building validated designs with real customer data. This concentrated process will move your Digital Transformation from Direction to Decision to Design.

Our proprietary Rapid Validation & Design Sprint is focused on the concept of Idea to Data and is based on the work and methodology developed by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Branden Kowitz in the book, SPRINT: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Our structured activities will help us rapidly answer big questions, solve major challenges and provide a direction that allows your company to confidently and rapidly move to the right solution. Common issues addressed by our sprint:

• Lack of real data that hinders effective business decisions without endless internal discussions
• Pressure to be “innovative” without a clear starting point or the proper components
• Expended efforts towards unclear goals that invite project scope changes

Digital Platform Construction & Custom Application Development

We pride ourselves in providing software development services designed to digitize your business processes in the fastest way possible, with the least about of risk, using the highest levels of modern security.  We work in two-week sprints where every release is of working software, except the first release which is a disconnected release.

Our development approach utilizes a customized Domain Driven Design methodology, featuring cloud native, full stack development. We are well versed in building 12-factor applications using microservices, and modern data management patterns.

Special Services

Unqork Enterprise No-Code

Implementation & Integration Services: Unqork is a no-code application platform that helps large enterprises build complex custom software applications faster, with higher quality, and lower costs than conventional approaches. Unqork can dramatically accelerate any Digital Transformation, especially in complex organizations that require enterprise-grade security and scale.

Cloud Integration & Migration

Integration is fundamental to building a differentiated approach to your business as well as the primary way to leverage innovations happening every day in the cloud. Tapping into the cloud’s API marketplace with your existing portfolio will allow you to quickly build feature rich, targeted applications with unique user experiences.

Coming to Migration, whether it is moving to cloud, utilizing the latest in container technologies or refactoring legacy systems to new advanced ones, Incus5’s team of experienced software professionals can assist you from start to finish.

Innovation

The innovation curve represents the time it takes for disruptive capabilities to be introduced into the marketplace. When the curve is steep, like it is today, the opportunity cost for not being able to leverage it can be staggering. For example, the dramatic reduction in the cost of artificial intelligence, thanks to the introduction of GPUs and the acceleration of network connectivity speeds, allows huge amounts of data to be gathered and analyzed.

Building custom applications with new cloud services, toolsets, techniques, and cloud native architectures, can provide similar benefits.

Therefore, our approach utilizes the cloud, white labeled SaaS services, client software and our digital products and assets to innovate at a greater velocity.