Services

Application development & maintenance

With the cloud comes access to incredible tools and capabilities, with the potential to solve problems and to save businesses time and money. We have the skills and experience to help you harness this potential to your own best advantage.

For over 30 years, we’ve succeeded in using technology to resolve our clients’ issues and to deliver business advantage. Now, thanks to innovations in cloud technology, we’re able to empower our clients to solve their own unique and particular problems – and it’s super-affordable.

For example, during the COVID-19 outbreak, we supported one of our clients to develop a bespoke mobile app that enabled them to health-screen thousands of site visitors every day. Sensitive data was captured securely and in a way that enabled on-site staff to take appropriate action based on outcome. This allowed our client to comply with corporate and national health regulations and to continue their operations, thereby minimising interruption to their business during the pandemic.

If you think we can help you, please contact us.

• Power BI

  We can help you make the most of Microsoft’s self-service business intelligence tool, Power BI, to extract even more value from your data.

  With Power BI, you have the ability to create coherent reports and dashboards using a combination of your own and other unrelated sources of data. This enables you to gain valuable insights and to share your findings in a highly visual and accessible way.

  We offer a combination of implementation services, training and assistance to help you adopt the Power BI platform and to gain maximum value from all that it offers.

  We’ll also make sure that your data pipelines and refreshes happen at the right time, not only to ensure that data is available when you need it but also that it stays secure within your organisation.

• Power Apps

  We can support you in using the Power Apps development tool, to create feature-rich and responsive custom applications that turn manual business operations into automated processes.

  According to Microsoft, Power Apps was designed to democratise the process of building custom apps without the need for writing code. However, while the tool was designed for ‘citizen developers’, getting started might not be easy for everyone. Plus the potential offered by the extensible platform – to interact with data and metadata, to apply business logic, to create custom connectors, and so on – may not be fully realised without expert support.

  We can help you and your team get up and running with adoption and training, while also assisting with any bugs and problems in your apps through our support services.

  Just let us know how we can help.

• Power Automate

  While Power Automate is a brilliant tool for carrying out repetitive tasks, we can demonstrate the added value of bringing human expertise into the mix.

  We can all see the benefits of having a ‘friendly robot’ integrated within the Microsoft 365 suite that is capable of taking on tasks so we don’t have to do them manually.

  However, once these automations are put in place, they are likely to become essential parts of individual and team processes – especially given their potential to save your business time and money. And because you will come to rely on them, it’s vital to have a backstop in place to ensure they keep running.

  We can not only provide you with this backstop; we can also help you to enhance your processes even further.

• Application integration

  At Doherty Associates, we have a great deal of experience in helping companies to link up systems, so that they work seamlessly together – freeing up time that would otherwise be spent exporting, manipulating, and importing data manually.

  Nearly all IT-enabled businesses have multiple applications, each performing specific functions – e.g. a finance system, a customer relationship management system, a document management system, a resource planning system. Or even a ‘Line of Business’ application that runs a whole company or department.

  These systems are typically designed to do one thing well. However, gaps may form when they need to link up – for example, when data from a timesheet system needs to be imported into a finance system to allow for cost allocation. And using spreadsheets to do this manually can be extremely time-consuming.

  We can support you in automating these processes using workflow and integration-as-a-service systems, or by directly integrating these processes with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We can then keep them running successfully so that the tedious manual work goes away.

• Azure application development and maintenance

  We can help you adopt the rich set of tools available in Azure to make application development easier, cheaper, and more reliable, or use them ourselves on your behalf.

  Once applications are live, we can help you make good use of tools such as hosted databases (that don’t need patching or maintenance) and web application hosting (that can scale up and down depending on the user load), as well as continuous integration and deployment with GitHub, and data engineering pipelines for big data processing.

  We’ll also help you understand what is going on inside your applications, and where necessary flag and even fix any errors automatically, day or night.

• Custom application development and maintenance

  When it makes sense to create an application that does exactly what you – and you alone – want it to do, we can create it for you. And then host and run it on your behalf if that’s what you need.

  When off-the-shelf tools cannot meet your unique business needs, you can always turn to us for a solution.

  For example, if an application doesn’t offer a specific feature you need, or if getting the exact functionality requires you to buy a whole new application that you’ll only ever use a fraction of, you can bring us your challenge and we’ll do our best to solve it.

• Cloud native applications

  We understand how cloud native applications work within Azure and are able to consult on the design, adoption, and use of these technologies to deliver maximum business advantage.

  We have a strong track record in making deployment easier and more reliable for our clients, and in keeping their applications running smoothly 24/7. And this is true whether they are using serverless technologies (where there is no infrastructure to manage), or container technologies based on Docker (such as Kubernetes or Azure Container Apps).

  We can also help you to use DevOps methods that make the transition from developer’s laptop to up-and-running system as quick as possible. And to make the most of self-healing applications that offer quick rollback in case of any errors.