Client:

Division of international financial services company

Problem:

DBA's and System Administrators had no direct way of understanding the business impact of servers containing internal business systems, failing. There were MSWord documents that were two years out of date that contained details of the business owner but no documentation or naming convention existed that linked the database to the relevant application. Key business controls were not being enforced.

Solution:

A real-time Service Catalogue application was designed, developed and deployed onto the Client's intranet. The application provided listings of all internal applications, the business owner, the system owner, the servers that the application was deployed on, the security classification, the business control points, the database name and database server instance. A central job history was maintained that linked all of the job history files on the various database servers. Business owners were alerted automatically if any job relating to their application failed. Change Management procedures were amended to ensure that on deployment, amendment or retirement of an application, the Service Catalogue was updated. Similarly, HR procedures were changed to ensure that any alteration in the personnel and their responsibilities were captured from the LDAP integration. System management procedures were changed so that any change in physical servers or virtual servers was reflected in the links in the Service Catalogue.

Outcome:

• Business Owners were able to view the current status of all internal applications for which they were responsible and were automatically alerted to any change or problem with the application.
• Systems Owners could manage allocation of resources better and were provided with the information that would enable them to plan the virtualisation of the servers and movement of applications between servers.
  
• DBA's, for the first time, were provided with the context within which the database instances were being used.
• Any user could look up the public information related to any internal application.
• Key business controls regarding responsibility and accountability were enforced.