IPL has experience of extracting rich business value from client data. We achieve this using an appropriate selection of skills from our portfolio including data warehousing (products, consultancy and design), data modelling, system integration, de-duplication, common sense and high calibre staff.

Data visualisation is the established key to unlock the full potential of your data assets. Tools such as spreadsheets, web portals and desktop search are readily available to capture, analyse and present most types of data. The dominance of these technologies illustrates the importance of data visualisation.

Until recently Geospatial data had been confined to the science lab. Tools used to visualise geo data were highly specialised, cumbersome to use and prohibitively expensive. This is beginning to change and today's lightweight geospatial tools are more readily deployed throughout an organisation.

This explosion in geo-data has been accompanied by the re-emergence of web-based solutions to short cut application deployment and data dissemination. Also open source, community driven solutions are being more favourably adopted in non critical environments such as visualisation and presentation applications.

IPL has recognised these trends and forged a low cost but highly versatile solution. Our consultants and developers have worked with existing open source components, commercial tools and mapping providers to deploy innovative solutions for a range of clients.

Effective information sharing is the mantra of modern government. Throughout IPL's 30 year history we enjoyed the benefit of working with many public sector organisations to analyse, facilitate and improve information sharing through both consultancy and systems development activities.

The importance of Geospatial data in many government activities is understood. However the geospatial world is based on immature, emerging technologies with significant data interpolation challenges. The EU is working to address this issue through the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) initiative. This was launched by the European Commission during 2002 and developed in collaboration with Member States and accession countries. It aims at making available relevant, harmonised and quality geographic information to support formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community policies. Parts of this legislation will become UK law in May 2009 and will directly impact the business requirements of public sector organisations who work with Geospatial Data.

IPL, with its established brand of quality assurance and data expertise, is ideally placed to help you address the challenges that INSPIRE will present at both business and technical levels.

IPL's most capable and credible technical consultants are available to sit alongside your business managers to ensure your supply chain delivers best value, timeliness and quality. By fully understanding the technical aspects and business goals our consultants are able to immediately notify of performance slippages and suitability of deliverables. Under certain circumstances we are able to offer a full management service where IPL adopts the prime contractor role and subcontracts the deliverables to a specialist 3rd party (perhaps an existing or smaller supplier). This creates a clear division of responsibility and helps our clients mitigate both technical and business risk whilst ensuring that robust management practices are adhered to.

Systems re-engineering is the process of taking a legacy, immature or failing system and enhancing or redeveloping it in line with current business requirements. At a commercial level the IPL method maximises the value of the original systems development investment whilst utilising current best practice to bring the system up to a standard that fulfils current and future business needs.

During our 30 years' experience of systems development we have developed a robust three step re-engineering process. Broadly this comprises the following steps:

• Investigate – Technical audit. The deliverable is a report giving our opinion of the system and documentation. This will recommend remedial actions.
• Process – We will investigate the development methodology used to produce the system initially and determine the level of quality assurance attached to the system. This typically involves auditing both the documentation and testing procedure. We will then look at how the business requirements have evolved. The deliverable at this stage is a project plan for moving the system forward.
• Leverage – Based on estimates we will work with the legacy system to leverage existing technical, design and processes assets to move the system to an acceptable state. We endeavour to deliver in an efficient manner a system that meets or exceeds current business requirements.

The Climate Change Bill enshrines in law binding climate change targets that are “stretching and ambitious”. This places an urgent obligation on Government to play its part in moving rapidly to a low-carbon economy.

IPL is well equipped to advise government departments and their their agencies on carbon reduction strategies and their impact on ICT policy. IPL is expert in communications and computing technology and can perform cost-benefit analysis on a range of options for achieving carbon reductions. Options include client-server and thin-client architectures, virtualisation, software efficiency, and use of data centres.

Over 30 years IPL has been exposed to a range of industries from Defence and Aerospace, Telecoms and Broadcast, through to Central Government and Finance. Each sector has its own best practices for approaching systems development. In the Aerospace world it is the norm to have requirements defined in detail, with associated tests and enforced levels of coverage. The telecoms market is adept in Agile development, where prototype systems are iteratively enhanced based on stakeholder feedback to rapidly deliver an innovate solution to market. The Public and Finance sectors' approach typically falls somewhere between the two; quality assurance is important but it is often not possible to define the system to the extent required for the traditional waterfall development method.

To address the conflicting business requirements of quality assurance, rapid development and shifting requirements, IPL's quality management system has evolved over 30 years to cater for clients in the middle ground. Our approach is a combination of iterative prototype development backed up by early stake holder engagement and a clear focus on user level testing.