You can immediately answer the question, how many IT systems do you have in your company? Until recently, neither could we. Therefore, now we will talk about our approach to building a single list of company IT systems, which was needed to solve the following tasks:
- A single dictionary for the entire company. Accurate understanding for business and for IT, what systems are in the company.
- List of responsible persons. In addition to obtaining a list of IT systems, it was necessary to understand who was responsible for each system, both from the IT side and from the business side.
- Classification of IT systems. On the part of the IT architecture, it was necessary to classify existing IT systems according to the stage of development, according to the technologies used, etc.
- Calculation of costs for IT systems. First you need to understand what IT systems are, then come up with a cost allocation algorithm. I will say right away that we succeeded a lot on this point, but more on that in another article.
Let's immediately answer the question from the title - how many IT systems are there in the company? We tried for a year to compile a list, and it turned out that there were 116 IT systems recognized (that is, for which we managed to find those responsible in IT and customers among the business).
A lot or a little, it will be possible to judge after a detailed description of what we consider an IT system.
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First of all, all departments of the IT directorate were asked for lists of IT systems that they support. Further, we began to bring all these lists together and make unified names and encodings. At the first stage, we decided to divide IT systems into three groups:
- external services.
- Information Systems.
- infrastructure services. This is the most interesting category. In the process of compiling the list of IT systems, software products were found that are used only by the infrastructure (for example, Active Directory (AD)), as well as software products that are installed on users' local machines. All these programs have been separated into infrastructure services.
Let's take a closer look at each group.
External services
External services are IT systems that do not use our server infrastructure. A third party company is responsible for their work. These are, for the most part, cloud services and external APIs of other companies (for example, services for payment and fiscalization of checks). The term is debatable, but it was not possible to come up with a better one. We recorded all borderline cases in βinformation systemsβ.
Information Systems
Information systems are installations of software products that a company uses. In this case, we considered only software systems that are installed on servers and provide interaction for many users. Local programs that are installed on employees' computers were not considered.
There were some subtle points:
- For many tasks, a microservice architecture is used. Microservices are built on a common platform. We thought for a long time, to separate each service or groups of services into separate systems. As a result, they singled out the entire platform for the system and called it MSP - Mvideo (micro) Service Platform.
- Many IT systems use a complex architecture of clients, backends, databases, load balancers, and so on. We decided to combine all this into one IT system, without separately singling out such technical parts as balancers, TOMCAT and much more.
- Technical IT systems - such as AD, monitoring systems - were separated into a separate group of "infrastructure services".
infrastructure services
This includes systems that are used to run the IT infrastructure. For example:
- Access to Internet resources.
- Data archiving service.
- Backup service.
- Telephony.
- Video conferencing.
- Messengers.
- Active Directory directory service.
- Email service.
- Antivirus.
We refer to all programs that are installed on users' local machines as a "Workplace".
The discussion on the set of services is not over yet.
Result of the first step
After all the lists received from the departments were consolidated, we received a general list of the company's IT systems.
The list was single-level, i.e. we didn't have subsystems. This complication of the list was postponed for the future. In total we got:
- 152 information systems and external services.
- 25 infrastructure services.
A huge plus of this guide is that, in addition to the list of IT systems, we agreed on a list of responsible employees for each of them.
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The list had a number of shortcomings:
- It turned out to be single-level and not completely balanced. For example, the store system was represented in the list by 8 separate modules or systems, and the site by one system.
- The question remained, have we received a complete list of IT systems?
- How to keep the list up to date?
Transition from a single-level list to a two-level list
The main improvement that was made in the second stage is the transition to a two-level list. Two concepts have been introduced:
- IT system.
- IT system module.
The first one includes not only individual installations, but logically connected systems. For example, previously the web reporting system (SAP BO), ETL and storage were listed as separate IT systems, and now we have combined them into one system with 10 modules.
After such transformations, 115 IT systems remained in the catalog.
Search for unrecorded IT systems
We solve the problem of finding unrecorded IT systems by assigning costs to IT systems. Those. the company created a system for distributing all departmental payments to IT systems (more on this in the next article). We now review the list of IT payments on a monthly basis and allocate them to IT systems. At the very beginning, a number of paid systems were discovered that did not appear in the registry.
The next step is the introduction of a single IT architecture platform (EA Tool) for development planning.
Classification of IT systems
In addition to compiling a list of IT systems and identifying responsible employees, we began to classify IT systems.
The first classification attribute we introduced is the life cycle stage. So there was a single list of systems that are now being implemented and that are scheduled for decommissioning.
In addition, we started tracking the vendor life cycle of IT systems. It's no secret that software products have different versions, and vendors only support certain versions. After analyzing the list of IT systems, those whose versions are no longer supported by the manufacturer were identified. Now there is a big discussion about what to do with such programs.
Using the list of IT systems
What we use this list for:
- In IT architecture, when drawing a solution landscape, we use common names for IT systems.
- In the payment distribution system for IT systems. So we see the total costs for them.
- We are restructuring ITSM in order to maintain information in each incident about in which IT system the incident was detected and in which it was resolved.
List
Since the list of IT systems is confidential information, it is impossible to give it here in full, we will show the visualization.
On the picture:
- Green indicates IT system modules.
- DIT departments in other colors.
- IT systems are linked to the managers responsible for them.
Source: habr.com