Originally published on LinkedIn on 2021-08-10.
Over the last years I had the pleasure to take care at serveral internal IT tools as an engineer beside production IT. At the beginning it was just about set up a servers, give people access and keep it running (somehow). I often had to focus at multiple things at once. And it was okay. But years later, the company grew. Someone had to take ownership on tools which are used by everyone inside the company. I got asked to do this for a dedicated tool in internal IT and want to share my experiences a bit.
Really taking ownership about an internal IT tool? Link zu Überschrift
- How boring could that be.. was my first thought.
- What does ownership mean? then next
I had to think about it. I talked with other people and realized how important this topic could be for a company. So it might be not the most fancy thing to do, but lets see what happens if you come from DevOPS and take ownership about an internal IT tool.
Automate the platform Link zu Überschrift
I was used to have automation for configuration management and deployment. Half a year we worked on topics to increase the quality of our deployment. Some upgrades, migrations and a complete redesign of the whole stack we reached our goal. Now the rollout, configuration and updates can be done via Terraform and AWX/Ansible. We also implemented HA functionality in all parts of the stack. Agile task management, wiki and source control managment services done like in production environments!
The automation based deployment changed also an other topic. It is less effort to create a test environment. An example: If you would like to test how you can migrate from an internal directory to an LDAP directory, it can be done in hours instead of days. It is also very easy to give people access if they want to test something or just want to learn how to use the tools.
Invest in your team Link zu Überschrift
We aslo invested in our skills and did trainings around the internal IT tools. This helped me to understand things better. At a first view a lot of things don’t make sense, but if you work with it and understand why it is made like this, at least some thinks can make sense.
Cleanup legacy Link zu Überschrift
In each system you have history. Important is to know when to keep it and when improve things which will block future improvments. An example could be unneeded Plugins where nobody even knows why they are installed. My way is to disable them, see who really needs it and try to understand why. For sure if it is not production related and with some alignment.
Now we had free time to focus on improvments for our employees.
Create a vision Link zu Überschrift
What is the ideal situation for our users and for us as admins to request something?
- On users side it is SELFSERVICE!
- On Infrastructure side it is AUTOMATION.
Know your needs Link zu Überschrift
Do a small survey and get an idea what emplyoees like and what they think should be improved. Also include the related service team. It could be that users are happy to use direkt communication but the service team is unhappy with the amount of direct messages. Tools like Slack are nice. But not made to use them as help center, collect data, automation or inventory system.
Think different and create something new Link zu Überschrift
We found a solution based on our existing systems which provided asset management and help center capabilities. After a POC it was clear for us to go in this direction. It helped us to canalise the requests and analyse what people need from us.
We imported all IT Assets from our old system. As basis for the next steps we aligned to build up HR information management first. This information is referenced nearly everywhere. Having IT assets and HR information in the same asset management with references gave us a lot possibilities. Automate employee onboarding and device support within workflows is nice for both departments. Approvals can be done without multiple emails. The device requests are handled by our help desk team in a structured an automated way. And workflow automation is used to update our inventory.
Sure it is not perfect yet, but we already saw this saved the HR and IT department already a lot of interupts and time. And this time could be used for other topics.
Create what you need Link zu Überschrift
An other key feature was a service created within the IT team. It is kind of a middleware which has endpoints to handle the payload of a ticket or asset information. With this we where able to automate the user and group management on different platforms. Triggered by workflow automation in the task management or help center, changes could be rolled out on multiple platforms.
Consultancy Link zu Überschrift
Also other departments recognise what could be possible. This is the point where we started to go even further an do a lot of consultancy and try to help other departments with their needs.
Ownership Link zu Überschrift
For me it is not the tool which made this happen, it can be done with different tools. The reason why we where able to build this up, is the ownership of the tool. And much more important a team with an open mindset, resources, skills and a vision.
For me the meaning of ownership got:
Working on a vision together with a team and have enough resources to make it happen.