Case Study: Government
Dumfries and Galloway Council

The Background: A wide geographical spread of IT resources
Dumfries and Galloway Council (D&G) is responsible for local government in the third largest region in Scotland, an area covering 2,380 square miles. 

The Information Services (IS) department of D&G is responsible for all local government telephony, computing services and data networks in offices spread throughout the region.  It also provides the ICT facilities and supporting services on which the effectiveness and efficiency of all Council operations depend.

The Challenge: Collating IT resources to aid restructuring
The use of ICT in the Council and elsewhere had developed to the point where the delivery of many services was all but impossible without continuous access to telephony, computing services and data networks.

However, it was deemed that the existing structure of a centralised ICT team underpinning individual departmental ICT teams was inefficient.  The structure did not enable effective management of IT, communication between the teams, nor between ICT and business managers. 

As a result, IT services and support across the D&G departments had evolved at differing rates, there was no standard hardware and software platform, and there was no single record of exactly what IT assets D&G possessed.  In addition business managers had little understanding of the relationships and dependencies between business processes and IT resources.

The Council decided to restructure to improve operational effectiveness. 

But in order to anticipate and comprehend the impact of restructuring, IS needed to collate the software, hardware and infrastructure resources in each council department, which were often spread across offices located across a wide geographical area.  In addition they needed to know how each IT resource was used, and by whom, in each department.

The Solution: A clear and simple picture of the Business and IT resources
D&G ICT Department chose Stroma^® to create a model to accurately portray what IT resources the Council owned, who used them, and the operational role they performed for each department.

Stroma^® was chosen because the OBASHI methodology it incorporates enables the creation of universally understandable Business and IT diagrams (B&ITs).  Building the B&IT diagrams would allow the Council to clearly see how their IT resources were utilised across geographical and functional boundaries.

Using Stroma^® utilities and Council HR records a repository of hardware and software elements was quickly compiled and tied to user accounts.  Within 24 hours the vast majority of hardware & infrastructure components, software inventory and print devices were captured and stored within the repository.

Stroma’s easy to use functionality enabled a ‘first pass’ of the model to be quickly created.  The interactive interface allowed the selection of the elements already populated in the repository to be ‘dragged & dropped’ and connected on the B&IT diagrams.  Even at this early stage the Council could immediately see that the infrastructure was overly complex and contained unsupported and obsolete equipment.  Early benefits were realised, for example, remedial projects were prioritised.

The model was then refined through a combination of markups to printed B&IT diagrams and analysis of data already gathered.  Other sources of information such as management interviews and WINS & DHCP databases were then crosschecked against the model to ensure that all key resources were captured.

When complete the model clearly showed how each IT resource was used within each department and within each geographic location.

Stroma’s patent pending modeling technology enabled intelligent analysis of the model.  Powerful reports could then be generated to see and measure the impact of restructuring.

Real Results: Restructuring and improved operational decisions
Stroma^® provided Dumfries and Galloway Council with a clear picture of the relationships between its business and IT resources.

The Stroma^® model enabled D&G to:

• quickly see what IT they owned
• easily communicate the complexity of ICT to business managers and the board
• strategically change the IS structure to better manage ICT
• identify critical vulnerabilities
• highlight potential areas of consolidation
• understand software licensing requirements
• accurately estimate the cost of moving to a common operating environment

The third largest local authority in Scotland used Stroma^® to clearly see and measure the impact of restructuring across all departments and geographic locations.