| Consulting Areas |
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Assess existing or anticipated technologies in light of organizational vision and mission. Evaluate alternative strategies and make recommendations. |
| Scenario planning is an invaluable tool for developing a viable mix of primary and hedge strategies. Analyze the global, regional, and local driving forces that influence the outcome of an organization’s choice of technology strategy. Determine predetermined elements, identify critical uncertainties, and develop a matrix of potential alternative scenarios. Develop realistic narratives that reflect the implications of each possible scenario. Present scenarios and guide discussion. |
| Perform user interface/experience evaluations ranging from simple heuristic analysis to full-scale observational testing of hands-on users in situ. Evaluation results can range from documentation of the analysis to complete re-design. Design user interface components and user experience for products and systems that are either in the planning stage or under active iterative development. |
| Ethnographic analysis based on observation in situ of users of existing systems and/or prospective users of systems to be developed. Develop documents that will enable system stakeholders to understand the organizational issues that could interfere with system development, and provide alternative ways of overcoming them. Redesign of work spaces and workflows can result, in addition to providing input to user interface/experience design. |
| In conjunction with contextual inquiry or as a part of user interface/experience evaluation and design, define persona descriptions of members of the various communities who will be affected by a new system or are part of an existing system. |
| Provide mentoring of leaders of IT teams embarking on their first project that will incorporate medical informatics or bioinformatics components. These projects involve dealing with different classes of stakeholders, complex knowledge structures and encoding schemes, regulatory constraints not found in other domains, and therefore present new challenges to development team organization and leadership. |
| IT staff new to healthcare and biomedical research domains face a significant learning curve coming up to speed on regulations such as HIPAA Privacy and Security, the EU Directive, the various parts of 21 CFR related to GxP, the FDA Guidance on computer systems development, FDA system validation audits, and research subject protection constraints arising from the Common Rule and the Helsinki Accord. |
| Design complex applications, including Web applications, which must provide intuitive, convenient access to complex knowledge domains. |
| Design monolithic or distributed systems that exchange and/or store complex data structures. Design information refinery applications that aggregate data from heterogeneous sources and route the data to heterogeneous outputs. |
