Trust is in the Service

This Mid-West Public University is well known as the first public institution of higher education in their state, with on-campus enrollment of more than 20,000 students, offering more than 160 major/minor options in the colleges of Applied Science and Technology, Arts and Sciences, Business, Education, and Fine Arts, and the College of Nursing.

This Mid-West Public University’s critical requirement was to maintain their mainframe operations while creating a simpler IT environment with greater flexibility to enable efficiency, reliability, and agile business operations at the lowest cost possible. Their key stakeholders wanted to be kept aware of the elements involved throughout their critical migration window.

There was concern about keeping in constant contact with the team during the migration weekend, due to the perceived risk and the need to make sure not only that everything was going according to plan, but that communication was frequent and transparent. Two of the deans on campus suggested that a blog be set up over the migration weekend, to add some levity into the “boring” migration weekend process of getting the necessary updates out to everyone. So, our mascot became an integral member of the migration team. Updates were provided regularly, and during the migration weekend there were more than 1,000 hits to our blog.

Challenge(s)

• Aging IT infrastructure
• Mainframe approaching end-of-life.
• Mainframe workforce retirements
• There were competing demands for resources and the continued need to deliver the expected levels of service to the user community in a cost-effective manner, along with the desire to keep pace with advances in industry.
• Staff had minimal experience working with outsourcing providers and did not know what to expect.
• There was concern about keeping in constant contact with the team during the migration weekend, due to the perceived risk and the need to make sure not only that everything was going according to plan.

Solutions

• It became apparent that outsourcing the mainframe was the answer.
• The decision was to create a virtual private cloud with Blue Hill Data Services and to retool staff and the environment to change the technical infrastructure.
• Designing a robust network with multiple redundant connections so there were no latency
  ssues. This architectural design also allowed the mainframe services to remain online during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the northeast United States.
• Knowledge transfer for a seamless transition and meet ongoing SLAs.
• Communication was frequent and transparent, and responsibilities were documented for each critical activity ongoing task.

This University was seeking a vendor established in providing mainframe processing services to support the continuous day-to-day operations of the University and to take advantage of current and future technologies. They required a vendor with sufficient corporate resources (financial, marketing assistance, research and development, service, and support) to satisfactorily perform the requirements of the contract in a manner commensurate with the scope of the project.

The mainframe at the University has been a key part of its ability to achieve the University’s vision by providing timely and accurate information to various customer groups. The University is in year six of the life of the current mainframe.

The biggest challenge was that no one knew what to expect. Although there were a couple of people on our team who had worked with outsourcing companies in the past and knew that this could work, very few other staff had experience with outsourcing providers and did not know what to expect. Questions like, what would happen if a problem occurred? How would it get resolved? Or would our user community get put into a queue and not get a real person on the phone? The good news is that a very good relationship developed between our staff and the staff at Blue Hill, and we felt secure that its needs would be met.