Our client, a UK Large Government Department, with 7,000 employees, was a likely victim of technical debt and legacy IT systems.
A recent report highlighted that there is a large volume of legacy IT that many government departments are funding the maintenance of (link). The report estimated that 50% of government IT budgets are spent on ‘keeping the lights on’, more commonly understood as maintaining legacy systems essential for national infrastructure operations whose support contracts have likely lapsed.
With this awareness, our client engaged with Wavestone to gain a better understanding of their IT estate through a discovery-based engagement.
Our client was motivated by the large unknown potential volume of legacy IT that they may be funding. They had conducted previous work to analyse IT spending, using external advisory services, albeit little headway was made regarding sources of legacy spend. However, they still did not have a centralised reporting framework for their IT estate, increasing their susceptibility to future outages and additional procurement and maintenance costs (to name only a few potential issues).
George Brooker – Wavestone – “To diagnose their potential legacy systems and shadow IT, the team in Digital required a means of viewing their IT estate from a centralised position, something that did not currently exist.”
Our client was also motivated to have independent, external advisory for the following reasons:
- Massively limited internal resources: External input would likely have more success in collaborating with parts of the department
- New Digital team and structure: Established after the merging of previous departments, and therefore limited digital foundation to establish a central view of their IT estate
- Lack of awareness: Due to the relative immaturity of the department, the Digital Team were not regularly considered as a point-of-call for digital-related requirements
Our client chose Wavestone to conduct the engagement for two reasons:
- Expertise: Wavestone has a proven track record for technical debt discovery and remediation work, so we’re well regarded and well suited when submitting a proposal
- Public Sector experience: Wavestone has conducted work for Office for Road and Rail
The discovery exercise was conducted to deliver the following:
- Summary of IT assets across the department and the underlying dependencies, including suppliers
- Summary of IT spend across the department, allowing streamlined sourcing and expenditure on IT services
- A combined central view of the IT assets that the Digital team were responsible for the upkeep and management of, identifying shadow IT
- High-level view of how client and business groups operate and break down and prioritise the discovery efforts
- Identify appropriate areas of the department to conduct the discovery exercise
- Collection of assets and suppliers discovered in a standardised manner.
- Social and technical discovery, conducting interviews and analysing data sources.
- Consolidated and validated information aligned with the business
Following this, Wavestone conducted a Technical and Social Discovery –
Data from finance and IT teams was analysed, alongside information gathered from stakeholder interviews. Information was inputted into a dashboard and tools implemented to facilitate future discovery work.
During this phase, the Wavestone team discovered that the strategy needed to be redefined in order to gain a full picture of the IT estate. The team worked closely with the client to redefine the scope of items to allow for an approach to discovery that would deliver a successful outcome.
Results and next steps
The first part of the discovery phase uncovered 469 assets, 96 of which were known by the Digital team across predominantly two business groups that we conducted the discovery on. Whilst the majority of asset and supplier data was uncovered through technical discovery, 94 social discovery interviews were conducted across the 12 weeks to supplement the data the team had received.
Wavestone presented the results of the discovery workstreams in a Power BI dashboard, to provide a centralised view of their IT estate, including a high-level view of the assets they knew about and the ones they did not.
We provided our client with training plans and frameworks to assist with process creation and the development of an improved data quality culture. This detailed the repeatable model for continuing the discovery work enabled our client to set up an internal procedure to conduct a complete discovery of the department, providing greater visibility of their estate.
Given Wavestone’s experience and expertise in IT Infrastructure, we helped to set up a CMDB (configuration management database). The purpose of this was to enable our client to repeat the discovery process in the future. This was particularly relevant due to a recent Cabinet Office mandate, with CMDBs being requested across all government departments.
The following elements were key to the successful outcomes of the project:
Expertise:
- Wavestone’s existing dashboard capability, adapted to suit the client’s bespoke needs
Collaborative approach:
- Responsiveness of key stakeholders, and their identification of supporting stakeholders and relevant technical persons in their directorates
- Maintained regular touchpoints with key stakeholders
Jacob Hill – Wavestone – “The key challenges for our client is the potential resistance from a technical and organisational perspective in progressing and extending the breadth of view of the IT estate, and how to make use of the information gathered. Our client has decided to store the information in in a CMDB, as per requirements communicated by the Cabinet Office.”
“We have helped by preparing a working inventory (to track the assets that we have discovered so far in the IT estate), thus creating a preliminary log of assets for uploading to a CMDB as a foundation for further high-level discovery work or deeper dives into key areas.”
