Question 1

The Challenge.

Accepted Answer

The Shared Services initiative is derived from the Transformational Government strategy aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency via the reorganising of assets and the sharing of capital investments with similar organisations.

Sheffield Hallam University adopted the initiative and began planning for the relocation of application services from their campus environment to a Shared Services datacentre. The challenge faced by the University was how to maximise the benefits of sharing services while ensuring service performance was not compromised. The University also wanted to understand how their applications were being used across the campus, in order to charge network and business applications usage to each of their faculties.

Question 2

The Solution.

Accepted Answer

The University commissioned Net Consulting to perform an application performance prediction exercise for their key services to understand which could be relocated without issue, which would require network link upgrades and which would not be suitable for remote operation. The results of the exercise have helped shape the thinking around the implementation of shared services and have avoided some potentially costly decisions.

In addition, Net Consulting implemented an Application Performance Monitoring solution to track per-department & per application data volumes, enabling accurate usage charging for those facilities. The performance metrics generated by the solution have also been used to provide an existing Service Management platform with an overview of end-user application performance