Rationalising Web Delivery Framework

A variety of current and proposed business initiatives from an air navigation service provider are dependant upon a robust enterprise-wide web infrastructure, presenting information to both internal and external customers.

Approximately 35 of the company’s web-related business initiatives are scheduled for implementation by 2010, capability which forms part of a portfolio of work costing over $40M. Most of these initiatives are produced in a ‘silo’ environment, resulting in occasional duplicate functionality between projects, as well as unclear or misaligned cross-capability dependency.

SMS was engaged to rationalise the air navigation service provider’s web delivery mechanism, the first step in moving towards a services oriented architecture.

The SMS approach was highly consultative, as the organisation operates as a number of independent (and often competing) business units.

SMS took the lead across a number of initiatives, taking into consideration stakeholder needs, technology requirements and the need for robust governance:

• ran workshops with key stakeholders and conducted over 60 interviews with personnel
• leveraged the existing SMS-developed Enterprise Architecture framework for greater detail
• developed a custom IT Governance framework (derived from best practice), taking into consideration the needs of six different web development teams in three different business units, a lack of security governance, and an internal infrastructure business model that tended towards proliferation rather than consolidation
• developed a Strategic Context which was based on the SMS IT Strategy model (as used with government clients) and captured the current state (including the organisation’s focus, users/customers, features/functions and systems) and provided a blueprint for the future state
• developed a number of views to provide the client with different perspectives on how to rate, review and prioritise their web projects. The views included interrelationship with dependency between projects (a high-level Gantt) and a weighted matrix (taking into consideration strategic alignment, architecture alignment, and process improvement)
  

SMS identified significant savings potential through rationalisation of servers and a standardised delivery mechanism.

SMS:

• proposed a solution comprising a significantly reduced number of different webservers (IIS, Apache), application servers (Tomcat and JRUN) and databases (SQL Server, Oracle, Access, PostgreSQL, Interbase and DBISAM), potentially reducing the number of servers by 80%, from 50 to around 10
• achieved agreement on the Governance Model identifying:
  • accountabilities to the point where individual processes in the web delivery lifecycle could be accounted to one or two key roles in the organisation
  • responsibilities from policy level through to the day-to-day delivery level
• demonstrated the need for a program (portfolio) management function to manage the dependencies between projects, as well as a robust and managed “To-Be” Enterprise Architecture
  

The air navigation service provider was able to clearly see the participants, systems and interrelationships in the web space.

SMS identified opportunities for significant consolidation and rationalisation of systems, enabling the company to more efficiently use its resources through clarity of accountability and responsibility, and consistency in approach to web delivery. Savings through infrastructure rationalisation, alone, could save the organisation in excess of $200,000 per year.