Mid this month the Australian partners at professional services company Ernst & Young voted 'yes' to the integration of Andersen Australia into the firm.
Stephen Arnold, CIO at Ernst & Young in Australia, said it had started detailed planning and analysis about four weeks ago, even before the final 'yes' was given by Ernst & Young's partners.
He reasoned that if it had turned out to be lost time -- if the integration of the two firms hadn't gone ahead -- then that was a risk it had to take because of the depth of planning which had been required.
According to Arnold, it had broken what it considered to be the necessities from day one into five main projects.
The team started by setting up a WAN connection between the two environments, and putting in the appropriate firewalls on those links.
Then it looked at the telephone systems, discovering that there was a total overlap of the dial plans. Because of this, it was decided to put in place new phone numbers for the staff being integrated from Andersen Australia.
The third task IT had to tackle was looking at the servers of the two firms, which Arnold said were luckily both running Notes and NetWare. However, implementation had been different at the two companies, such as server configuration, versions of software being run, and patches which had been applied.
-It's actually a different environment completely to have to bring together -- we have to plan what we would need to do to reconfigure the machines," Arnold said. This was started last Friday in the evening, and finished at midnight on Sunday.
With different versions of Lotus Notes being run on the clients, it was also important to make sure that the new environment co-existed with the old one so that staff who had come from Andersen Australia could still access legacy data.
Arnold said it had also been following up on the PC upgrade over the past 24 hours, which had been part of the initial projects following the firms' integration. Every PC from Andersen Australia was upgraded so that staff had access to Ernst & Young resources, such as standard templates. It also made sure that there was a consistent level of patching and virus protection.
Although an automated process had been set up to take care of this, Arnold said it had found it had to do a lot more manual work than the firm had hoped.
He said this was because of greater variance in the way the PCs had been set up than it had expected. PC upgrades were also carried out over the weekend, with follow up with about 15 percent of staff who either hadn't left their machines in the office, or whose PCs they'd had problems accessing for some reason.
Arnold anticipates that the integration work will continue for up to six months. This includes building WAN links between offices in various cities, implementing the full Ernst & Young telephone system across the board, and additional work on databases.
He said there was also more to be done on the server side of things, such as building in more of the standards like clustering, and enabling the sharing of data. He envisages that once the bulk of the infrastructure is integrated, probably by July, major relocation of staff between buildings will be possible.
