As chief information officer at Iona Technologies, one of Ireland’s leading software-development companies, Colin Rogan’s role is atypical of Irish IT managers.
Instead of managing a single-site IT department addressing the requirements of a local business, he must manage a team spread across several countries and time zones.
As an employee of one of the world’s leading integration specialists, he is better placed than most to anticipate the benefits and pitfalls of introducing new systems and applications into a well established technical infrastructure.
And instead of encouraging reluctant technophobes to embrace the benefits of IT in their business, he finds instead that he frequently has to curb the enthusiasm of some of the brightest and most technically aware people in the industry.
‘We don’t have to sell IT too hard to people here,’ he says. ‘In a non-IT company people may not understand the merits of technology, but given the level of knowledge people here have of what’s available, it’s easy for someone to say: “why can’t we do this?” and it’s actually a challenge to try and maintain a discipline.’
‘We have to consider matters like the security implications of some of the new technologies,’ he points out, ‘and whether it’s going to be good for us as a business or not. Maybe if we were still in startup mode we could implement things a lot more quickly, but once you have an infrastructure to support, you have to maintain it in a way that allows you to build and evolve the systems slowly, and that doesn’t always happen as quickly as some people would like’.
Although a round of restructuring was announced just as this article was being prepared, Iona currently employs 620 people spread across three regions EMEA, the Americas and Asia Pacific.
Rogan’s department, which accounts for about 5 per cent of the total employee head count, is spread across all the regions served by the company and maintains three major data centres. The first one is in Dublin and mainly caters for Iona’s business in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Another data centre in Boston looks after the US business and a third in Santa Clara, California serves the Asia-Pacific region.
Essential tasks
There are two essential tasks that the IT department has to perform: support the engineering development that is at the heart of the company’s business; and support the standard business functions, both at front-office and back-office level that are common to any publicly quoted company.
Each of these business areas has its own specialist applications and over the past few years, Iona has systematically standardised these so that all the various regions run on the same core technical infrastructure.
‘There was a time during the growth of Iona where we might have had different applications in different regions and there was a little more independence and lack of standards,’ said Rogan. ‘But we’re at the stage now where we consistently apply the same systems, standards and procedures globally.’
The appearance of different applications in different regions performing similar tasks often comes about after one company acquires another. According to Rogan, the company has been quick to bring new acquisitions into the existing IT infrastructure the company operates.
‘We haven’t come across an infrastructure that we wanted to maintain,’ he says. ‘In the case of back-office systems, we never acquired a company that had a major enterprise back-office system like SAP. Some of them had PC-based accounting systems, so we moved them all over to SAP. In the case of source-code management, they all went over to ClearCase. So we never needed to integrate an acquired company’s systems with ours.’
New rollout
In the case of sales-related applications, the company had until recently disparate sales and front-office support systems in different regions. In January of this year, the company completed the rollout of a single sales and customer-management application, eWare, to all regions, a process that had begun in May of last year.
The choice of eWare as a strategic system followed a standard procurement procedure that Iona has in place for such acquisitions.
‘Typically we prefer to buy rather than build,’ says Rogan, ‘although we are not afraid to integrate systems together when necessary. We have a pretty good scorecard-based process for evaluating potential purchases. There are four dimensions to it, namely: business functionality, technical fit, the supplier and the cost’.
Assessing the technical fit includes considerations such as ease of management and maintenance, choice of platform and availability of integration features. Of late, Iona is tending towards Web Services technology to achieve the latter.
Evaluating the business fit is largely down to the business managers of whichever part of the organisation the new application is trying to serve. They determine how well the new product would help them achieve the business benefits they are trying to achieve.
Choice of supplier takes in such factors as how well the company knows Iona’s business and the quality of its previous reference sites.
Each of the factors is then given a score, with some areas being given higher weighting than others depending on what is being considered, and then a short list is chosen.
‘In the case of the sales system,’ says Rogan, ‘we did a technical fit and supplier fit and narrowed it down to four vendors, whom we then invited in and asked to give a demonstration to the business people. They were involved in scoring the process. The result was that we agreed on a pretty strong vendor, which turned out to be the Irish company eWare. We chose eWare for a number of reasons but it scored very highly on the process we went through’.
One of the clinching arguments for eWare was the ease with which its product could be integrated with Iona’s back-office system. ‘We have a product called Enterprise Integrator which is a message hub that allows you to take a business process and apply rules to it,’ says Rogan. ‘One of the things we liked about eWare was that the company built in a Web Services interface to allow us to link it to Enterprise Integrator. Every new application must work with Enterprise Integrator because it’s part of our technical architecture now.’
Iona implemented the eWare system over two phases: first for its European business and then for the US.
Three-tier support
Iona operates a three-level support structure for its main business applications, split between inhouse and outside personnel.
‘We try to provide first and second-level support from within our own resources in each region,’ says Rogan, ‘and then go outside for third-level support, either directly to the vendor itself or to a third party. Our people inhouse have the skills, cross training and knowledge to do basic fault finding of a particular issue, be it an e-mail problem or a network infrastructure issue’.
In the case of SAP, which is the main back-office system used by Iona, and which runs on a single server farm in the company’s Dublin headquarters, the IT department nevertheless has to support users from several different countries and time zones.
Rogan explains how they do it. ‘We have first-level support for SAP is in every region,’ he says. ‘Then there is second-level support in Dublin and for third-level support we would typically go to SAP themselves. SAP have a good support infrastructure around the world, so problems of that nature can usually be handled locally.’
The various levels of support are carefully defined. For every system that it runs, Iona has a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which should, if followed: ‘allow somebody with a basic knowledge of a particular system to identify a run of the mill problem and solve it,’ according to Rogan.
‘They’re following a procedure that was written by somebody expert in that area which should help them find the fault,’ he says. ‘Typically, it would say something like “If you follow these three simple steps, you should be able to resolve the problem. If the level of knowledge is beyond your skill level, move to second level support”.’
This level of support typically involves someone having a deeper understanding and knowledge about the system, either because they were involved in its development or because they have been trained to support it.
Second-level support is maintained in-house and in each region where possible. In the case of SAP, however, that resource is maintained in Dublin. ‘If there is an issue with SAP in Dublin,’ says Rogan, ‘then we have a team here to alert to that. If it happens in the US, then they have to call someone in Dublin to deal with it. We have people on call to handle that eventuality’.
If the second-level team can’t resolve the problem, it is escalated to the third level where outside help is brought in.
Engineering concerns
As the main business of Iona is software code development, one of the key applications the company supports is a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool called ClearCase.
As well as managing the operation of that application, Iona also has a lot of infrastructure to support and maintain the systems that the engineering teams need.
This includes an eclectic mix of servers at the company’s Dublin data centre which are used to test the newly written code. ‘Because we produce so many different products for so many different platforms, we have very expensive server farms here to allow engineers to test that the finished products work on all the various platforms for which they are intended,’ says Rogan. ‘These range from Windows 2000, to Solaris, Unix and IBM mainframes. We administer and maintain those servers for the engineering function.’
As well as using the standard ClearCase system, all of Iona’s 200-strong engineering team use a variety of other tools to develop code and share knowledge and tips with each other.
Rogan says that when it comes to the individual tools that each developer uses, there is a lot of autonomy given to the engineering department to make those choices for itself. It has its own budget, separate from Rogan’s IT budget which is only used for systems used by the company as a whole such as infrastructure and back-office systems. ‘We don’t get involved with that,’ says Rogan. ‘We support their environment only.’
However, the engineering team has built up over time a collaborative knowledge base and infrastructure to enable each member to work better. One of the most prevalent things now is a system called WIKI Pages, which allows sharing of developers’ knowledge.
WIKI Pages is a system of Web pages which users can edit and maintain themselves and which others can navigate around quickly using hyperlinks.
‘Engineers use it as a collaboration centre,’ says Rogan. ‘We set up a WIKI server in each development centre and everyone can edit their own pages. It’s a great way for engineering teams to collaborate and share information. It’s user driven, so they can show others how they did things and solved problems. It’s very easy to use and it took off very quickly.’
Reinforcing the point about a technically competent workforce eager to use new technologies to help them in their work, Rogan says that the developers’ favourite collaboration tools are e-mail, WIKI pages and recently Web logs or Blogs, which are essentially online diaries maintained by the individual developers.
Budgets
Rogan’s IT budget is about 4 per cent of Iona’s revenues (or $5m on last year’s figures) and that is for purchasing and supporting IT infrastructure or systems used by the entire company. Requests for investments in IT are driven by business leaders in each of the areas of engineering, sales, general administration and IT infrastructure. Rogan is the business leader of the latter, as one of the dozen or so members of the senior management team that reports directly to the chief executive.
Like many in the industry, Rogan has noticed a distinct shift in priorities in the decision-making process that leads to IT investments.
‘We don’t run IT projects,’ he says, ‘we run business projects. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that whereas in the past, return on investment (ROI) would be calculated over a three to four year term, it’s now down to 12 to 18 months. If we can’t see a rapid return on investment, it may not make sense to do it. That challenge is being put to the business side, not IT. The challenge is for them to show how the return would be of positive benefit to the business. It’s up to them to prioritise their activities so that they see a return on investment within a shorter period.’
‘That has an effect on their priorities, because some of their high priority items might have a very long term for ROI,’ he continues. ‘They’re looking for shorter term returns on investment so the list is changing. We’re moving to a more tactical type of implementation, rather than longer term strategic investments.’
11/07/2003
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