Moving IT spend from Maintenance to Innovation – Part 1

It’s been a while since I have posted anything to the blog so it is well and truly time for an update. Of late I have been getting back into software development in a more hands on kind of way, now being in a CIO role for a New Zealand company.

The company I now work for (Aspeq Limited) specializes in regulatory assessment and is expanding internationally and at the same time moving towards being in many respects what most would consider a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider. This is on top of its long established business focused on management of the people facilities used to run exams. In a nutshell if you are a pilot or aircraft engineer in Australia, New Zealand or possibly in India, China, Macau or further afield – you’ve probably sat one of our exams or assessments.

Being a relatively small but focused company, there are a total of only six technical staff myself included (a big change from managing a 350 person ICT services company in Hong Kong and China for me) and a fairly modest technology budget. Coupled with this the team is involved with the support of over 45 permanent and mobile exam delivery centers and custom software development of two fairly major line of business applications as well as the support of earlier versions of the application and company infrastructure.

As you can probably imagine this drives a strong need to innovate and control spending – whilst at the same time ensuring an environment very similar to that of an Airline with scheduled exam sessions and online booking requiring near 24/7 operational availability. This continues to be an ongoing challenge in terms of ensuring that technical resources are not consumed by routine maintenance (and cost management) and instead are focused on delivering innovation to the business and in turn effecting a positive outcome on overall topline revenue or business productivity.

So how do we achieve all this with the limited resources we have and still have time for software development? In a nutshell we have a strategic approach of in-sourcing the strategic items (line of business application development), standardizing all of our systems and outsourcing the commodity type services like email. Implementation of this strategy remains a work in progress, but to date it looks something like this on the infrastructure (maintenance):

• Standardization on Dell PC/Laptop hardware with next business day onsite warranty, with a standard desktop image automatically loaded by CDROM – we no longer need to ship equipment back to our HQ, fix it, image it and ship it back + keep spares
• Reduced internet costs/increased reliability by connecting our head offices in Australia and New Zealand directly by cable to the Verizon Canberra NIC and I-Serve ISP in the same buildings respectively.
• Implementation of open source systems monitoring system (Nagios) and SaaS based Siteuptime.com (for customer facing systems) to page us via SMS when key infrastructure has a problem replacing an expensive and difficult to use proprietary system.
• Standardization of network infrastructure and unification of New Zealand and Australia networks with Australia head office acting as a hub, New Zealand head-office as a backup hub connecting over the internet via secure VPN to keep the costs low. This includes an IP based telephone system allowing us to for example make a call between our Perth Office and Lower Hutt office without incurring any telephone charges.
• When buying hardware we no longer buy “bleeding edge” – particularly when it comes to servers. For our purposes a $4000 NZD 1U Intel server with mirrored disks is fine and probably over spec’d – let alone the fully redundant HP Monsters we were buying previously at $20,000+ each.
• We also previously had a lot of duplicated infrastructure across the Tasman – particularly with two unconnected instances of Exchange Email Server. This has been consolidated into a single instance running in New Zealand where the bulk of our staff are, with Australian staff accessing it via the VPN. With Outlook Cached mode this works well – and as any Exchange Admin can tell you reduces a lot of effort for the IT team as we now only have one Exchange and a unified Directory across all of our offices – not to mention our Australian and New Zealand offices being able to share calendars…  next step is migration of all users to Google Apps to save on office license costs, and reduce our TCO for email.
• Implemented a free helpdesk and asset inventory system called spice-works – it doesn’t quite have all the queue management functionality we’d like but is close enough and allows us to track technology requests – and is now also been used extensively by the rest of the business to track customer requests and issues.
• Developed a mobile exam centre model based on Laptop computers with a wireless 3G router packed up into rock concert style padded transportation “Coffins”. Taking a page from my time at Getronics, these are shipped around New Zealand by a 3rd Party logistics provider as Dell does with its warranty parts program. This means that Aspeq doesn’t need to hire permanent facilities and establish permanent network connections and cabling and results in much higher utilization – and without the need to pay travel expenses for staff to move laptops around.

So we now have a network that is pretty standard, utilizes low cost VPN based connectivity and is centralized rather than duplicating every thing in each new country we operate in. Most of the facilities (including telephone) are also available via VPN on the road or home for our users. To cap it all off, the network essentially runs itself letting us know via an SMS page on our mobile phones if there is an upcoming problem (low disk space etc) or an outage.

But most of all, these cost savings allow us to move the focus of our IT spend from just keeping things going (cost management) to actually innovating with IT. Next week I’ll blog a little bit on what we are doing in that space with a focus on applications development and some of the open source components, and project management tools which are in some cases better than that offered by Microsoft – and a lot cheaper.

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