Positive Impact on a Business Platform
Improving platform sustainability and resilience for a Commonwealth Regulatory Agency.
The Client
A Commonwealth Regulatory Agency
The Challenge
The agency’s form engine platform consisted of many technical and operational inconsistencies. For example, language across different environments, domain aliases and server hardware configurations were all inconsistent. Lack of utility existed between the different environments, and there were security issues surrounding system passwords. Deployments and testing were all undertaken manually with associated administrative overhead and potential for error.
Our Approach
The key business drivers were to:
Reduce technical overhead.
Assist with evaluating the transition to Cloud (SaaS) and a fit for purpose future state.
Create a sustainable and easily maintainable future forms platform and environment.
We undertook a detailed system architecture and application configuration review. This involved an internal assessment of the agency’s SmartIQ technology platform, including its various lower environments, associated interdependent/integrated systems and custom componentry.
How we achieved it:
Document analysis was the first technique employed to understand SmartIQ configuration. However, a lack of detailed documentation surrounding SmartIQ’s current dependencies (e.g. templates, fragments, data sources, customer questions etc.) made this problematic. This resulted in DDP conducting several workshops with key SMEs to better understand the technology landscape.
We ran workshops with both IT and Business Transformation teams and undertook a review of the infrastructure, server and application configuration items for each environment, analysed deployment and configuration between environments, interrogated interdependencies between work items and reviewed customisations.
DDP reviewed the current state platform infrastructure server and application configuration for each of the four system environments (spanning development through to production).
Numerous workshops were conducted with key stakeholders to clarify questions surrounding the current state architecture and understand key pain points.
DDP’s technical specialists also undertook a detailed technical analysis of the systems in question via proprietary digital solutions and manual exploratory analysis of the technical stack.
Elicitation of current state workflow and architecture was then documented and diagrammed. Furthermore, each artefact produced underwent detailed review/socialisation and subsequent approval by appropriate SMEs (as per the stakeholder matrix developed during the planning phase).
Key Outcomes
The documented and approved current state diagrams are used as a baseline reference for future state recommendations for improvement.
We provided the agency with an assessment of the business impact, complexity and recommended implementation horizon for each recommendation to allow the agency to strategically plan a way forward.
