Move CRM Application to Managed Servers

The CRM Application had organically become a business critical system but was unstable, crashed regularly, needed to be taken offline weekly to deploy patches, and rebooted so regularly that a scheduled task had been created on the server.

Due to the instability of the application, there was a negative impression and no individual had taken the responsibility to investigate and fix the issues.

The CRM application was deemed, by the users as 'the bane of their life' it was slow, crashed all off the time but was a necessary evil as it was the only application they had which allowed them to follow business processes and departmental methodologies (which were created by people who did not use the application).

Nicholas saw this as a challenge to get his teeth into. Making the CRM application run faster and not crash would help the entire company. This was an especially important time as the organization was expanding it's work force and their roles would be directly involved in the minute by minute use of the CRM application. Upon investigation, Nicholas identified several issues.

• The CRM Application was hosted on unsupported, outdated and unreliable hardware from it's initial implementation which did not involve any infrastructure specialists during it specification.
• The sever was initially purchased as a low powered proof of concept and testing box, at short notice with no planning and deployed by the application support team.
• The server was not specified for line of business use and was acquired at bare-minimum cost.
• The application had grown into the business organically and the disaster recovery strategy had not been considered to reflect this change in status. The operating system and software had been through many bug fixes and upgrades which were agreed by the non-I.T. operations team and orchestrated by the relevant Database and Application specialist and consultants.
• The underlying network infrastructure had not been considered during the deployment. A total of 80% of the servers were one year beyond suggested end of life for in use by the organization.
• Lack of communication between departments, and nobody taking responsibility had put the organizations' line of business application at serious risk.

Nicholas Llewellyn immediately organized meetings with Database and Application specialists and consultants who were involved with the 'terrible CRM application' internally to discuss the issues.

The members of the teams were initially quick to point the finger but Nicholas suggested a change in thought process which improved relations between all departments and motivated the staff to suggest fixes instead of complain about problems.

With the help of consultants who were already employed by the organization and resourceful time-management, Nicholas was able to specify the servers to replace the current system, get the backing of both teams, working together with the I.C.T. department staff and gap sold a managed, hosted, centralized server solution to the Board of Directors which make the platform more available, better performance and lower risk tied into a Disaster Recovery solution.

The upgrade and re-hosting of hardware and networking infrastructure now provides a secure, stable platform on which the web-based application can deliver an internationally capable, efficient, fast and scalable CRM system for the growing dynamic SME.

A long term side effect of this project were improved confidence in the application from the Board through to operators, improved communications within the organization, and consistently better co-operation between teams and increased profitability.