The WA Department of Sport is looking to outsource as much of the agency’s data centre services as possible in a bid to push staff into the development of new features rather than the maintenance of IT infrastructure.
Led by recently hired CIO Andrew Cann, the department is midway through migrating its data centre service to WA government cloud provider ServiceNet.
Cann hopes to shut down the department's server room by June this year.
Cann told iTnews he wants to have his small IT team (five-strong) focused on adding value to the business rather than keeping the lights on.
Most of the team’s time thus far has been spent on the day-to-day management of the agency’s IT infrastructure, he said.
“That means that IT haven't been seen as a strategic partner and many business units have had to seek solutions elsewhere,” Cann said.
With no additional budget or staff to work with, Cann has made the hard decision to "look at the most effective way" of using the assets he's got.
Rationalisation
The agency had virtualised some 80 percent of its servers on the VMware hypervisor platform prior to Cann's appointment. He has since managed the remainder, to ensure a smooth migration to ServiceNet's private cloud, which also runs on VMware vSphere.
“We also had to go through an application rationalisation because there’s a lot of in-house apps running that no-one was using,” Cann said. “We shut down around 50 VMs and cleaned up maybe 10TB of storage that wasn’t being used properly.”
Cann has pushed out the hosting and delivery of the department's SharePoint and Dynamics applicatons to third parties, and plans to do the same for HP's TRIM application and SQL server databases over the coming months
The department is also targeting the public cloud for its dev and test servers.
It is in discussion with three providers to determine the best value for money and ease of management. Cann said for test and dev, he (and regulators) have few concerns about whether that cloud is hosted onshore or offshore.
The department will consolidate 18 virtual dev and test servers down to 10.
Cann has reinvested some of the money previously spent on licensing and capital into the new cloud service, and freed up what remains to undertake other critical IT projects - including a WAN and VoIP overhaul.
Read on for Cann's recent work on the applications front...
Bringing government grants into the online world
Cann recently flicked the switch on a new online grants application system to allow WA athletes and clubs to apply online for one-off funding from the state government.
The system runs on Microsoft’s Dynamics in the backend with a SharePoint frontend, and was built and deployed within three months.
The team had to move fast to respond to an announcement by the state Minister for Sport earlier this year, of two new subsidies programs for sports equipment and travel costs.
The subsidies required an online application solution to manage an influx of around 400 applications in two weeks.
He decided to upgrade a version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM used internally and re-purpose it for the new online grants system.
Cann described the prior system as a "vanilla, out-of-the-box" solution that "hadn’t been implemented properly."
"We had to upgrade to the latest version and rebuild it from the ground up, and put in the business processes we needed to handle customer relations.”
The department had been using a home-grown grants management system to store grants data, which wasn’t sufficient for the new subsidies scheme.
The manual process involved the entering of paper applications into the system, which Cann discovered were then being replicated across eight other bespoke systems.
The decision was made to consolidate all these systems into Dynamics, but given Cann’s lack of resources, the department partnered with IT consultancy Velrada for the consolidation and system upgrade.
Cann now plans to use Dynamics as the foundation of the department’s CRM and core business functions into the future.
“If we look at the core business processes, we’ll pick one off at a time and move them into Dynamics - things like event management, project management etc - all that can be done in there, and linked together,” he said.
“That information currently sits in people’s heads or in diaries and multiple databases. One staff member carries around a box of diaries with her, they are full of information that needs to be recorded in a CRM.
“My goal is to have a before photo of her carrying the box of diaries and an after photo of her with an iPad.”
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