Texas DBITS Service Categories

VIP can offer services through DBITS in the following categories.

Project Management

Strong project management is one of the vital necessities and key success factors in any project. VIP helps mitigate the risk of project failure by providing tailored Project Management solutions to meet the unique needs of its clients.  VIP’s solutions include PMO deployment, hands-on project management, earned value definition and management, portfolio management, and project management software implementation. VIP can provide an assessment to pinpoint a project's true status, determine the effectiveness of current processes, identify risks, and ultimately develop a plan of action to help it succeed. With PMI certified project management professionals, defined methodology, templates, and tools, VIP helps clients achieve established objectives related to scope, quality, time, cost, and stakeholder satisfaction. VIP has an excellent and proven track record in managing projects on time and within budget.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

VIP delivers high-quality professionals, application solutions, and outsourced services covering back office functions such as financials, human resources, learning management, and asset management. VIP offers services spanning all phases of the project lifecycle from initial assessments through implementation and support. Whether you are defining requirements, upgrading a single application enhancement, or implementing a new module, VIP ensures that the solution we deliver aligns with your business objectives.

Our solutions include strong relationships and experience with SAP and Oracle.  Our solutions also include our own Meridian Global, an award-winning Learning Management System (LMS) for analyzing employee performance, delivering required learning, and tracking and monitoring results. Meridian Global’s .NET/Web 2.0 technology provides all the traditional LMS features, while enabling ease of configuration, employee collaboration, assessment tools, robust reporting, performance management, and analytics. Meridian Global supports LMS implementations that range in size from a few hundred up to 900,000 users.

Application Development

Application Development includes development of new applications which may be mainframe, server, network-based, web-based or a combination. The requirements for new applications may require interfaces to existing applications. VIP helps our clients exceed their business goals through the application of experienced staff and enabling technologies, supported by thought leadership, methodologies, tools, and best practices.  Our services include software design, development and implementation; maintenance and operations, testing and quality assurance, as well as reporting and analytics.  VIP’s expertise extends to network and telecommunications applications and infrastructure.  We can support specific project tasks or end-to-end projects.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

VIP has extensive experience in providing application development services for federal, state, local government, and commercial clients. VIP is experienced with best practices, assessments, requirements development, and strategic alignment of technology with clients’ business objectives. VIP has provided full system development lifecycle services supporting numerous government Web-based and SOA initiatives. We are committed to structured life cycle methodologies and industry standards – Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc (IEEE) – that are proven to reduce risk and cost on large technology implementations. Our SOA services cover planning and assessment; requirements development; proof of concept; implementation; deployment; governance; application programming and support services; system software administration and support; and training support. For our SOA based efforts, we also include detailed steps in the Requirements and Design phases to identify the Web services that can be consumed (or reused) by functions across the system. A SOA approach requires more upfront effort to identify opportunities to design and reuse services. As these services are developed, the total time and effort is reduced by avoiding duplication of functions and code. The testing approach for SOA is tailored to be sure all functions that consume a service are analyzed for impact and regression tested when a service is modified.

Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V)

IV&V is a disciplined approach for ensuring the compliance of all software related items with the defined requirements. IV&V efforts consist of management tasks (e.g., planning, organizing, and monitoring the IV&V effort) and technical tasks (e.g., analyzing, evaluating, reviewing, and testing the software development process and products).

VIP has provided IV&V oversight, program and project management, quality assurance, and testing services for state, local, federal, and commercial clients over the last 14+ years. VIP's IV&V and oversight services provide our clients with an independent set of eyes to assess and monitor project health. The services are tailored to meet the unique needs of each client and the activities are structured to generally accomplish three things:

  • Monitor risks, issues, schedule, and budget. Establish and report independent earned value metrics to track and monitor project performance. (oversight)
  • Determine whether the products expected within the scope of a particular phase in the development process are consistent with the requirements of that phase and the preceding phase. (verification)
  • Provide independent assurance (and testing) that the final product satisfies the system requirements. (validation)

Application Maintenance and Support

VIP helps its clients be successful even after solutions have been deployed. We offer a full range of Application Maintenance and Support services supporting large-scale, mission-critical applications and databases (i.e., Oracle, MS SQL, Siebel, SAP). VIP has over 14 years of extensive experience providing application and system maintenance and support for many of its government clients, including work at the Federal, State, and Local levels.

VIP’s Application Maintenance and Support services define the activities to be performed for the operational support phase of a system. These activities help to ensure that the system performs consistently during the operational support phase in accordance with service level objectives and requirements. In addition, procedures are provided for monitoring the system maintenance and enhancement as the system matures and needs evolve over time. VIP delivers with confidence and reports results based upon achievement of required business objectives and service level agreements. As part of our standard operating procedure, VIP provides logistics and key performance metrics on an ongoing basis while supporting business functions 24x7x365.

VIP’s specific approach to providing Application Maintenance and Support/Operations and Maintenance (O&M) focuses on the need to stabilize and enhance the Client’s IT services by implementing long-term processes and procedures where necessary.

VIP’s Application and Maintenance Support/O&M services are far-reaching and cover the following sub-categories within the O&M domain:

  • Bug Fixes and Code Correction
  • Minor Enhancements
  • Daily or Routine Monitoring
  • Upgrades to Application Software
  • Direct Application Support
  • Reporting
  • Testing
  • Conversion
  • Legacy Migration Services
  • Expansion of Existing Applications
  • Security Services

Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse

The BI/DW practice within VIP has maintained its focus for over a decade delivering successful projects and solutions around business intelligence, data warehousing, data integration, and data migration. This practice offers full service solutions, providing clients with better information to make more informed business decisions. We have provided solutions focused on initial project inception with readiness assessments, Return on Investment (ROI) analysis, requirements gathering and project planning, all the way through selection and implementation of a business intelligence tool.

VIP’s mature best practice approach is proven to deliver standardized, repeatable, scalable architectures and solutions. Our offerings span technical architecture and strategy recommendations, data architecture, data quality expertise, ETL architecture and development, as well as full data warehouse life cycle design and development. We have extensive experience helping clients upgrade their technology environment while bringing them up to speed on the value and capabilities.

VIP is a firm believer that our consultants are the best in the marketplace. We support this belief by providing the ability for our consultants to become certified on the tools and technology of their expertise.

A primary benefit of our focused BI/DW practice is the ability to specialize in strategic technologies. VIP has embraced this expertise through various avenues within our practice:

  • Our delivery team has in-depth knowledge of Business Objects. We have a talented consulting bench that has years of experience with BOBJ technology, and are able to support the tools with excellent expertise.
  • VIP helps clients to become proficient and self-sufficient. We offer both public and on-site custom classes for data warehousing, data architecture, and business intelligence solutions. Our experienced instructors have training backgrounds combined with real-life knowledge, which increases the value of the classroom experience. We are effective in delivering courseware to our clients, and pride ourselves in delivering high-class training. We offer services for technical training, as well as helping to develop and deliver internal training to end users.
  • Our designers and BI tool experts work with our clients to ensure the information coming out of the BI tool our clients invested in is exactly how they want and information is presented the way they need it. We have expertise with the most popular BI tools in the industry including Hyperion, Business Objects, Cognos, SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services, and MicroStrategy.

Information Technology Assessments and Planning

VIP has provided Information Technology Assessments and Planning services for multiple government clients over the last 14+ years. Neither technology nor the needs of an organization remain static. VIP performs Technology Assessments to compare a client's current technology to their requirements, industry best practices, and new solutions. From topics around server consolidation, security architecture, performance, total cost of ownership, staffing and SLAs, VIP's experienced technologists can offer analysis, recommendations, and a road map for change.

When faced the challenge of change, VIP also helps clients create a business or technology strategy that outlines what they want to achieve and how they define and measure success. Together, VIP helps its clients turn the strategy into tactical action plans. This type of planning effort might be an annual institutionalized process or might come about as the result of a special event like a massive reorganization, a merger, or the implementation of new enterprise technology. While we firmly believe the plan itself is an important outcome, we often hear that the "process" of strategic planning is at least equally important. It builds buy-in and collaboration and helps to ensure clarity in execution.

IT Assessments and Planning services can include projects such as the development of an IT Strategic Plan for a State Agency or an IT assessment to determine if a new system may be warranted to replace existing, obsolete technology. For example, the primary purposes of an IT Strategic Plan Development project could include: (1) a strategy for coordinating a client’s business and systems needs within the limitations of existing State and Federal mandates, (2) a master planning framework within which to validate and prioritize current and any additional IT planning activities and projects, and (3) ensuring that critical data is available to all required entities to support critical functions.

Technology Upgrade/Migration and Transformation

VIP recognizes that successful Technology Upgrade/Migration and Transformation projects require not just technical acumen, but also ongoing communications between stakeholders and the project team to develop workable and successful solutions – experience has shown that achieving effective change management is the first success factor for large-scale, enterprise-wide system upgrades, migrations, and transformations.

Our Technology Upgrade/Migration and Transformation services include current application portfolio assessments and evaluation of the technology assets before beginning technology transformation and Business Case development for justification of an initiative; technology transformations (which may include, appropriate Return on Investment (ROI), benchmarks and milestones); planning; analysis; requirements development; proof of concept; deployment; implementation; integration; remediation; data migration; documentation; application programming and support services; and training support.

VIP helps clients define a business case to ensure their long-term goals are achieved. Business cases clearly delineate project information and the cost-benefit justification for why specific IT initiatives should be supported as top priorities versus others that might not rise to the top to compete with precious resources. A repeatable process that defines clear outcomes creates results that include a higher ROI, savings of time, and better alignment of initiatives with the organization's strategic business goals.

VIP has helped numerous government and commercial clients with conducting system/application upgrade assessments, collecting all the upgrade requirements, performing analysis, research, mapping requirements to new application functionality, and determining an optimal upgrade/migration roadmap. We have also supported large-scale, enterprise-wide system upgrades, migrations, and transformations. For example, VIP is currently directing activities required for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to transfer operational responsibilities from an outsourced data center to an IBM consolidated data center. We are working with DFPS setting transformation and consolidation strategy, guiding technology planning, and setting transformation policies and priorities. VIP will also plan, assign, and oversee the work of the transformation team. VIP provides strategic and tactical advice on current and future systems architectures, system capacity, IT governance, and drives a best practice approach to achieve project objectives.