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Advisory Services
The Advisory Council drives IT success by helping organizations make quicker, cost effective and informed decisions. Clients utilize us to save money, to avoid making costly mistakes, and to quickly access hard-to-find information. The Experts who comprise our Decision Support Network are seasoned practitioners that have a deep understanding of a broad array of IT issues. The SmartGrid - Ensures an enterprise vision
 
Alignment   Business Value
People/Process/Career   Technology
Advisory Service Deliverables

Access to TAC’s Expert Decision Support Network is secured through an annual retainer. Our Experts deliver their advice, perspective and action plans through...

Personal Advisory Reports (PARs): Personalized, in-context, written answers to clients’ specific questions. These are normally under 1000 words in length, and are in direct response to the specific question. Standard response time for PARs is three-to-five business days.

Expert Phone Calls: For situations where a written response is not required, we offer telephone consultation with a TAC Expert. Telephone consultations are typically less than 30 minutes, but may run longer if necessary.


Advisory Services Value

TAC lowers the cost of IT decision-making by providing actionable, objective, external advice that helps your organization reduce the time to achieve a decision, while enhancing the outcome.

When the Finance and Legal teams have questions, they turn to CPAs and outside counsel for expert guidance.

How often have your sat in meetings with the Finance team trying to figure out if a purchase can be capitalized or needs to be expensed? The Accounting team would never take the risk of making a material mistake with the balance sheet without first seeking some expert guidance — and neither would the Legal team either. To answer those questions, the CFO and Legal teams retain external professional firms to help their groups work through the variety of difficult issues.

Who does the IT group have to turn to?

IT groups have always had research houses and consultants to turn to. When research firms first appeared more than 30 years ago, System/370 mainframes ruled IT, and Digital Equipment’s VAX was the hot new thing. Research houses have stuck to the same model of pumping out generic “consumer report” style analysis in a race to create the world’s most complete IT encyclopedia. Consulting firms continue to work to imbed themselves into clients to maximize billable projects.

Increasingly, organizations are turning to TAC’s Expert Decision Support Network for the experienced-based professional advice that Finance and Legal have had for years.

How the Network Provides Advice

Access to TAC’s Expert Decision Support Network is secured through an annual retainer. Clients get to chose how and when to engage our Experts’ advice, and request delivery in a manner that best suits their issue. Our Experts deliver their advice, perspective and action plans through either...

  • Personal Advisory Reports, or
  • Expert Phone Calls.

As an enterprise-wide solution, anyone on the IT team, from Architects to Vendor Management, can access the network. Since there are no distribution restrictions, TAC advice may be shared with whomever you want in your organization.

TAC SmartGrid™ Methodology

IT organizations are being hit with questions from an increasingly tech-savvy user base, management team and boardroom. Our clients recognize that no amount of spending will provide them with all the in-house expertise to answer every question. TAC’s SmartGrid™ methodology was developed to focus the experts broadly on the business drivers, and not solely on technology features and functions. This helps IT organizations make better decisions.

Accessing the Expert Decision Support Network

Anyone authorized by the client’s organization can receive access to TAC’s Expert Decision Support Network. The TAC portal contains access to the archives of webinars and SmartTips™, and clients utilize the portal to request advice in the form of Personal Advisory Reports or Expert Phone Calls. When they present their issue to the Expert Decision Support Network, clients specify the topic, the business goal they are trying to achieve, articulate what constraints exist, and can upload any relevant document.

Within three-to-five business days of the request for advice, an Expert Call is scheduled or the Personal Advisory Report is delivered to the user. Expert Calls usually last 30 minutes to an hour, while Personal Advisory Reports are approximately 1000-word documents.

Every TAC client is assigned a Personal Advisor to ensure quality and act as an interface between the Client and the Experts. Personal Advisors moderate all Expert Phone Calls and review Personal Advisory Reports before posting the document to the user’s individual portal.

A Bit More about Our Experts...

Over the past few decades, computer use has expanded to all corners of the enterprise; broadening the scope of information technology (IT). This expanding scope of IT has coincided with an increase in the complexity of the systems which enterprises deploy and maintain, resulting in increased specialization among the people required to support an enterprise’s technology. To classify IT’s ever increasing specialization, The Advisory Council created a taxonomy covering all IT practice areas.

When we created the taxonomy, we identified 882 distinct IT practice areas, and grouped them into five general categories: software, hardware, networking & telecommunications, services, and management. The pie chart shown below represents the distribution of the 882 identified subject areas among those five categories.

When we enroll Experts in our Decision Support Network, we identify the IT subject areas covered by each Expert. Currently, our Experts cover 97% of the 882 IT practice areas. Throughout this web site, we utilize this pie chart to identify the associated taxonomy grouping and the underlying IT subject area number to highlight the breadth of our Expert Decision Support Network’s ability to address virtually any issue facing your IT organization.

IT Subject Area Pie Chart: Software, Hardware, Networking, Services, Management

The list below provides an overview of the various taxonomy areas.

  • Application Development
  • Application Integration & Middleware
  • Benchmarking
  • Business Intelligence
  • Business Planning & Analysis
  • Business Process Management
  • Compensation, Skills & Workforce Management
  • Consumer Technologies
  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Data Management & Integration
  • Emerging Trends & Technologies
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Enterprise Strategy & Business Development
  • ERP & Supply Chain Optimization
  • High-Performance Workplace
  • IT Asset Management
  • IT Infrastructure & Operations
  • IT Management
  • IT Services
  • IT Strategy
  • IT Valuation
  • ITIL Strategy & Implementation
  • Mobile & Wireless
  • Networking & Communications Equipment
  • Networking & Communications Services
  • Open Source
  • Outsourcing
  • PCs, Laptops & Handheld Devices
  • Performance Management
  • Program Management Offices
  • Regulatory Compliance
  • Risk Management
  • Security & Privacy
  • Servers & Storage
  • Social Networking
  • Vendor Management
  • Vendor & Technology Selection
  • Web Services

To view actual success stories TAC achieved with our clients, please see the Results page. To view recent client inquiry subjects, please see the Recent Inquiries page.

For more information about The Advisory Council, please contact us online or call us at +1 781 791 9582.

About The Advisory Council

Offering advisory, consulting and leadership solutions, The Advisory Council was founded in 2002 to provide the objective IT business advice that organizations require to make decisions more quickly and cost effectively. Clients include Fortune 1000 and midsize companies, government, and educational institutions.

 
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