Managed apps prove arresting for Vic Police
It may have forced the long arm of the law to do some serious wrestling, but a major shift in application management strategy has reinvigorated the IT operations of Victoria Police and fostered a proactive partnership-based approach that has improved user satisfaction and reduced support call volumes by 50 percent.
Under the terms of a complete outsourcing contract signed years ago, more than 20 of the organisation's critical business systems were maintained by a third party, while individual business units were encouraged to choose, implement and manage their own relevant applications.
As a result, the outsourcer found itself focused more on firefighting and infrastructure maintenance than on proactive applications strategy. Over time, this approach had taken a toll on users' perception of the BITS (Business Information Technology Services) division, which was seen as far less efficient and effective than it needed to be.
Centralising management
Under the guidance of new CIO Valda Berzins, the organisation was looking for ways to improve IT's responsiveness. Ultimately, it was decided that the best approach was to change the single-provider approach to a multiple provider approach. This strategy would see applications responsibility split between an outsourced application management provider and a re-empowered BITS, which had lost most of its technical staff to the previous service provider in its big-bang outsourcing contract.
"We were seen to be sitting in our ivory tower and not being very responsive," concedes David Gung, group manager for applications management within BITS. -When we first did total outsourcing first, we transferred a lot of our expertise across to the service provider. But we figured that by centralising management of all applications and having multiple service providers, there could be economies of scale."
Victoria Police eventually contracted Fujitsu as its managed application services provider. Under the terms of the contract, Fujitsu would administer a broad range of applications on Victoria Police's behalf, working alongside the high-level managers in the revitalised BITS organisation to continually monitor and improve the overall applications environment.
To hold up its side of the deal, Victoria Police had to bulk out its technical team, since it only had around a dozen technically competent staff left inside the organisation. Providing more responsive service would require a bigger footprint of skills, so BITS went on a hiring spree that eventually brought on 38 new integration architects, applications architects, and similar strategic type roles.
Loosing the shackles
Victoria Police's new staff were charged with helping build a more responsive applications environment, but this wasn't the kind of thing that could happen overnight. Facing an organisation riddled with functional "towers" and their morass of applications, Gung needed to convince the managers of those towers to delegate applications control to the centralised BITS team. Ultimately, the promise of a leaner, more responsive operation helped this approach come to fruition.
"Recruiting an additional 38 people really let us beef up our IT governance," Gung explains, "but negotiating the transfer of resources across to the central IT department was a challenge in itself. There were existing agreements in place between the business units and third party suppliers, but I've transferred the responsibility for managing those third parties into the IT department."
Fujitsu took up the reins of Victoria Police's applications environment in early 2006. Over the next year, Gung says, the two organisations have built a new culture of proactive management that is delivering very real benefits both in terms of day-to-day operations and overall governance.
One of Fujitsu's first tasks was to review Victoria Police's application environment, earmarking ageing or inefficient systems that could do with replacing. This auditing process also involved an extensive documentation exercise that saw many applications clearly documented for the first time.
"This process highlighted a lot of areas where we were at risk," Gung explains. "Fujitsu helped us document business critical applications to a certain level that will enable any future party to support them. That's something that hasn't happened too well in the past, but we're improving all the time."
Fujitsu also introduced a more responsive process for receiving, cataloguing and -- most importantly -- acting upon user complaints and support requests. Proactive analysis of hundreds of such requests helped focus developers' efforts on particular problem areas, prioritising fixes so that outstanding problems can be fixed more quickly than was possible in the past.
A year after it went live, Fujitsu has expanded the scope of its operations from 20 applications to more than 300. Several key applications -- for example, Oracle Financials and the Victoria Police firearms registration system -- are still managed by other parties, but by and large the new situation has eliminated the mess that came from having many business units managing their own applications.
The new BITS has gathered momentum as previously separate "tower" managers warm to the new approach. "Now, all the business units are coming to us for assistance," Gung says. -A lot of them have learnt from their own experiences, where they may have developed 13 separate databases for their local needs, then found it's unworkable. We've integrated those and converted them into a single, more robust database for corporate use."
Locking up proactivity's benefits
A year later, the benefits of the new managed application services arrangement couldn't be clearer. Most significant, support calls from Victoria Police's 13,000 staff across the state have dropped more than 50 percent, largely because involving Fujitsu in both helpdesk and application strategy has let it proactively identify and stamp out problems before they become chronic issues.
"There has been a lot of change, and it has been noticed by our users," says Gung. -Under the new and proactive model, they will try and improve the environment and reduce the cause of the firefighting. They'll do their analysis and say to us 'if we can change this particular application it will reduce your calls by so and so'."
For example, Fujitsu recently identified several issues with Victoria Police's content management system that were causing regular crashes and a flood of calls from frustrated users. Fujitsu proactively noticed the spike in calls, identified the problem, proposed a remedy, and resolved the problem before the support burden got out of hand. Since then, the IT organisation has received exactly zero support calls from users related to that system.
That's the kind of benefit that comes, Gung says, from tying one's future to that of a managed application service provider that is not just working to meet arbitrary service level agreements, but as applications manager works to aggressively root out underlying application problems.
"These days, we get a lot of positive feedback from the users -- for example, that a certain process used to take so many minutes to run and now it takes just seconds," he laughs. "My regular [status] meetings with Fujitsu used to take two hours, but now we're usually done in half an hour because of the lack of issues there. And if they're spending less time solving day to day problems, that's more time we can spend on other developments and enhancements."
These aren't empty statements: since bringing Fujitsu on board, Victoria Police has also been able to embark on a major upgrade of its data centre facilities, with a new disaster recovery site -- expected to be completed next month -- adding much-needed predictability to the performance of the organisation's data infrastructure.
"Because of decreasing day to day firefighting, we're able to use baseline resources within the contract to do more productive and strategic work," Gung says. "The savings we got going from a single provider model enabled us to build this capability."
