Logicalis

Managed Services client Wilton Re extends its software development capabilities with consulting services from Logicalis. Wilton Re is a successful company in the life reinsurance market.

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Wilton Re is a successful company in the reinsurance vertical that has as its business model the formation of long-term relationships with strategic partners. Wilton Re’s concept of close interaction with partners is reflected in its approach to technology. Since its formation two and half years ago, Wilton Re has partnered with Logicalis to provide its complete IT infrastructure, from backend servers, database and email management, networking connectivity, and IP telephony all the way through to desktop and notebook computers.

CIO Andy Wood concluded it wasn’t necessary for him to build an IT infrastructure and staff an IT department to serve his end users. Logicalis could do that for him. “By having Logicalis manage our IT services we are free to concentrate on building innovative business processes and deliver business intelligence in conjunction with collaboration instead of building our IT department,” Wood says. “It’s all value driven.” (Read the case study on Managed Services at Wilton Re here.

Consulting Services
The relationship with Logicalis for managed services has worked out so well that when Wood wanted to use technology to enhance Wilton Re’s ability to collaborate internally and with its business partners, he turned to Logicalis Consulting Services to manage a software development project based on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007.

One of Logicalis’ six primary service areas, Consulting Services acts as an extension to an IT department’s team and provides highly trained consultants to help with software development in the areas of business intelligence, application development and integration, enterprise support and supplemental staffing.

Nine-year Logicalis veteran Patrick Simmons was enlisted as project manager for the Wilton Re development project and worked closely with Senior SharePoint Developer Jason Dearinger to design and implement a custom collaboration and document management system according to Wilton Re’s specifications.

The system Wood envisioned would need to be an evolutionary leap beyond the ad hoc SharePoint 2.0 implementation that was already in place. The good thing about the existing system, Wood says, was that it was user-driven and showed how Wilton Re employees and partners worked in a more or less free-form environment. Wood wanted a new system built around how the users were using the existing one that would also provide granular levels of security and a dependable architecture, and would lay the foundation for comprehensive document management.

“What’s in it for me?”
Wood says enhanced collaboration, search and sorting capabilities were the answer to the typical business user’s question: “What’s in it for me?” That enhanced document management came in the same package also answered some important questions for Wood.

After reviewing the existing system with Wood and key users, Simmons and Dearinger recommended standardizing on an architecture that incorporated meta data for all documents. The standardized architecture would eliminate the tendency to create new folders every time an end user needed a place to put a document. The meta data would make the entire system easily searchable, and the granular security features built into SharePoint would make it possible to allocate access precisely to different sets of users.

Mile-Wide Inch-Deep
The process by which the project was developed was, in many ways, as important as the end result. It applied a classic “mile-wide inch-deep” approach to development that validated the architecture and the use of meta data and established a repeatable process that eliminated development risk for the entire project within the early phases.

A key component in the process was the development of a series of discovery scripts that collected detailed information about the existing system that could then be used to design conversion scripts that would integrate all existing documents into the new architecture.

“The scripts enabled us to automatically convert from the old site to the new site,” Wood says. “They also gave us a record of what was converted in one log as well as a second log that identified what did not get converted and why. By running the conversion program iteratively, it was possible to identify and address all errors and special cases systematically.”

“Not only that,” Wood, adds. “The use of the scripts allowed us to confirm that we could convert the data—a potentially huge risk—at the beginning of the project. Most people think about conversion at the end; they also think about usability at the end; they think about migrating into production at the end; they think about performance at the end. And they don’t know if any of those steps will actually work until they get there. We took all those risks out of the project right in the first iteration. We knew it would all work, before we actually did it.”

Iterative Migrations
“Another advantage of our approach,” Simmons says, “is that there was never a platform freeze on the old portal. Every time we ran one of our iterative migrations a new discovery script would go out, find out exactly what was in the portal at that moment, and run it through the business rules. Anything that didn’t fit the rules would then show up in an error log, and we could look at it right then and there. The users were able to use the old system right up to the day we cut over to the new one.”

The full project was rolled out in the same incremental approach. “We started with the IT site, where we knew we had a friendly user base,” Wood says. “Then we proceeded, repeating the same steps site after site. Each iteration after the main conversion was not about risk,” he adds. “It was about execution. As an IT guy, I’m all about managing risk and cost, and with a document management system, the biggest risk is always conversion. We took that risk out right at the beginning.”

In the end, the custom SharePoint collaboration and document management system developed by Logicalis delivered the standardization, security and integration that Wood wanted and, at the same time, was readily adopted by users who were won over by improvements in the search and collaboration capabilities.

Out of the Park
The benefits of the repeatable iterative process that Logicalis employed extend well beyond the completion of the project. The discovery scripts that were used to collect information from the old system, Wood explains, can now be adapted to collect information from the new one, establishing a cycle of incremental enhancements that responds directly to how the system is used over time.

“Because of our very positive experience with Logicalis’ Managed Services, their Consulting Services team knew they had to hit it out of the park for me to be just pleased…and I’m actually delighted,” Wood says. “We like to partner with Logicalis because they have a broad range of skills we can ramp up and ramp down as we need them. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Logicalis’ capabilities, professionalism and integrity. They make a great partner.”