PRISA CONSULTING, a business process and technology strategy firm, is to create 20 new jobs over the next three years, backed by investment of €1.25 million over that period.
The Dublin-based company currently employs 11 people. The new positions will include business analysts, business process and change management consultants, programme managers and technical consultants with skills in telecoms, network design and enterprise resource planning systems, as well as other disciplines.
Formed in late 2010, Prisa’s expansion to date has been funded by private investment of €250,000, with a further €1 million to be invested over the next three years. The company’s target is to reach annual revenues of €4.5 million by the end of 2014.
The funding will be sourced from a combination of a private internal investor, some external investors and retained earnings, said Prisa’s chief executive John McCabe.
Mr McCabe has more than 20 years’ experience in senior technology and business consulting roles with companies such as Avaya, Prime Carrier, Damovo Ireland and DINSA in Spain.
He formed the company to focus on business strategy and consulting. Prisa is deliberately not affiliated to any one technology vendor in order to avoid a taking “technology-first” approach to projects.
IT can be the scapegoat when change projects go badly, and industry estimates put the rate of ICT-related failures at between 40 and 60 per cent.
“A lot of projects don’t work because they’re trying to force in technology as opposed to looking at the business process and how that serves customers,” said Mr McCabe.
While technology providers can sometimes be to blame, customers are sometimes reluctant to take the time needed to plan projects more carefully.
“You need to spend three, four or five months to ensure these projects work. The initial bit is: what’s your strategy, what are you trying to achieve, and what business processes do you have in place . . . We also tend to forget culture a lot when we deliver IT projects.
“You’ve got to understand the culture, and all organisations are different. The culture comes back to the people.”
Mr McCabe said organisations are keen to get involved where measurable results can be delivered quickly. Last year Prisa halved one client’s costs over a 12-month period and in another case reduced an organisation’s IT spend from 9 per cent of turnover to 2 per cent.
About 30 per cent of Prisa’s work to date has been in Ireland, working with private and public sector clients. Most of its business has been in Britain, where it focuses on utilities like energy, water, transport and telecoms.
The company recently delivered an enterprise resource planning system to an organisation that was formerly part of the British national grid. Another client is Hertz, which it helped to improve its customer self-service systems using speech recognition.
The company is also looking at opportunities in other markets, including Spain.
