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In-Depth Information
The last department was also involved in providing internal system integration to some
extent to the other two departments, especially the CRM domain. Only a few solutions
were developed in-house, mostly for integration and service abstraction. The number of
applications in the application's portfolio is unknown but can be roughly estimated at 50
in CIO, 200 in CTO, and 100 in CNO.
The HQ's application farm is deployed, maintained, and administered on two business
data centers with more than 600 virtual machines, each in clustered environments, hand-
ling multitenant and individual accesses for regional offices. The level of multitenancy is
low at the present moment; about 90 percent of all VMs are country-specific, although
their business logic is similar with very small variations.
Regional offices have their own local application infrastructure that supports business ap-
plications in regional offices and maintains integration with core HQ apps related to the
affiliates.
It must also be mentioned that in some countries, a corporate entity has more than one af-
filiate, depending on the line of business. The level of an affiliate's technical efficiency
varies, reflecting business proficiency. Each of the three HQ administration offices has an
IT division with its own departmental structure and organizational hierarchy. There are
regular meetings between the IT managers from all divisions, but outside of that, there is
infrequent communication or coordination.
The vendor selection process and new product procurement routines are formalized by
policies, which are specific for each department. The standard RFI/RFP process could
take up to 10 months according to these policies; at the same time, the requirements for
new product/projects' implementation are about 6 months. IT resources are rarely shared
between departments.
Business goals and obstacles
The recent annual financial report demonstrated the best corporate earnings over the last
10 years. At the same time, a detailed analysis revealed that operational costs have in-
creased considerably compared to the last year by almost 10 percent. The reasons can be
identified as follows:
• Two new strategic products were released last year with the first stage covering
one third of the countries in operations
• Some applications have been migrated from local premises to a private cloud that
is built on a corporate data center
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