Application Modernization and Platform Standardization
SUMMARY
A significant portion of IT budget is typically allocated for upkeep and maintenance of business critical applications. The more the applications, the larger the support team. In every organization, there are a few business critical applications that are EOL’ed. These present major challenges to the CIO for the following reasons:
- Supportability
- Security
- Technical Debt
- Compliance
- Knowledge Management
The subsequent sections detail our approach towards modernizing a business critical application responsible for tracking third party used oil collections and generating invoice instructions
KEY CONSIDERATIONS
Platform Standardization :
The CIO had identified ecosystem simplification as a key organization goal. T
- Reduction of Environment Footprint
- Based on incident type
- Priority
- Channel
- Average first response time
- Average time for closure by priority
- No of reopens
- No of RCA’s and RCCA’s
Configuration Management
We distilled the ecosystem into a set of configuration items to generate a view that drove standardization and supportability. We discovered and segregated the CI’s into a multi-tiered category set and aligned them to various queues based on our support matrix
Incident Management
We wanted to make it easy for employees to log an incident. Employees can open tickets in the following ways
- Call a hotline
- Send an email to create a case
- Create a case from Microsoft Teams
- Use the Salesforce Portal to log a case
Problem Management
- We implemented a standardized process to identify when an incident becomes a problem. There are also a set of effective actions to be logged in to drive Root Cause Analysis and Corrective actions.
Knowledge Management and Centralization
- The key to process driven response and resolution lies in capturing and reusing knowledge to support the customer. We leveraged both SOP’s as well as Wiki’s to drive knowledge creation and management within the organization.
KEY LEARNINGS
- Dashboards were very important in helping us wrap our arms around the initial case load
- There is no one size fits all for categories and queues. It is dependent on the team and support structure. Keep your categorization simple.
- Same rules for fields and validations. One validation that worked really well for us was enforcing entry of resolution details.