A large organization, with over one hundred internally built IT applications available on its intranet and extranet, retained stpsolutions to update a totally out-of-date catalogue of the details of all its applications - which business unit owned them? who built them? how were they supported? which servers were they on? what were the security rights? how were these enforced? which databases did they use? which network segments were in use? where was the code base? etc. etc...

The initial instruction was to undertake appropriate investigations and update and then publish an MSWord template running to some 200 pages. This assignment was duly completed but during the course of this work it had become very obvious that it would soon become redundant if a process was not created for all the different parties involved in the creation, deployment and use of these applications to be able to update their portion of the Service Catalogue as part of their day-to-day activities.

stpsolutions submitted a proposal to the client setting out a vision of what was possible. Having obtained high level buy-in from the management and the requisite budget approval, stpsolutions  proceeded to design and develop an ASP based intranet application that presented all of the information that had previously been stored in the MSWord document and introduced role based security and workflow to ensure that the maintenance of the data was an every day occurence and anyone seeking information would have an up-to-date view.

One of the principal benefits had not been envisaged in the original design. For the first time the IT support personnel could call up a list of all the applications affected by a particular outage in the IT infrastructure and have immediate access to the Business Unit managers that would be affected. Suddenly they became proactive instead of reactive.