In 2015, KITS proved its capability, through the 18 months transformation of a major UK government agency’s new IT Programme with an annual running cost of £34M.

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This poorly performing and expensive system was re-architected, transformed, migrated and then optimised for performance and value, resulting in a highly performant, high capacity platform with significant improvement over original requirements and an annual run cost of £5.5M; saving £28.5M p/a.

After the failed implementation of the new digital-by-default online service, KITS were engaged to solve a large number of Technical and business problems inherited by the agency, namely:

• An IT Solution requiring 300 concurrent users, consistently crashing at just 21 logons

• No Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Environments for the Production system

• 30+ proprietary environments and teams inherited, with total run rate of £34M p/a

• Uncontrolled data usage by other suppliers and developers

• Database and application platforms operating at 100% 

 

Phase 1: Provide Minimum Viable Service

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KITS undertook to address the most critical areas immediately ensuring the minimum required service was fully available to the agency’s clients.  KITS then designed three additional phases of redesign, migration and transformation consisting of 65 separate initiatives.

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Phase 2: Assessment, Plan and Redesign

Having undertaken an in-depth IT assessment and identified the bottlenecks in the configuration of the 33 inherited IT environments, KITS designed a new target architecture for the agency.

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Phase 3: Implement Production Environment Migration

KITS proposed and moved the poorly performing Databases on to new server platforms, owned by the agency to house the production Oracle databases, introducing real application clusters (RAC) and inter-datacentre disaster recovery capability, along with virtual machine (VM) additions to the solution presentation layer.

 

Phase 4: Manage Transformation

In the final phase, with the migration complete, and having replaced large numbers of proprietary and external supplier resources with a significantly smaller number of KITS dedicated specialists, they were able to fully realise the benefits set out in their original strategic assessment and target architecture solution.

 

Summary

During the programme of work undertaken, KITS also:

• Performed 7 Data centre environment moves, each consisting of more than 3,500 individual steps, each monitored, validated and recorded

• Reviewed and optimised software licences and platforms maintenance on the agency’s behalf, saving more than £10M p/a in renewals

• Reduced operational headcount from 63 to 26 personnel, by using automation, performance monitoring and environment cloning