Catalog of IT systems of the company

You can immediately answer the question, how many IT systems do you have in a company? Until recently, we also could not. Therefore, now we will talk about our approach to building a unified list of IT systems of the company, which was needed to solve the following tasks:

1. Unified dictionary for the entire company. Exact understanding for business and for IT, what systems are in the company.
2. List of responsible. In addition to obtaining a list of IT systems, it was necessary to understand those responsible for each system, both from the IT side and from the business units.
3. Classification of IT systems. From the IT architecture side, it was necessary to classify existing IT systems by development stage, by used technologies, etc.
4. Calculation of the cost of IT systems. First you need to understand what IT systems are, then come up with an algorithm for allocating costs. I will say right away that we have achieved a lot on this point, but this is covered in another article.

Immediately answer the question from the title - how many IT systems in the company? During the year we tried to compile a list, and it turned out that the recognized IT systems (that is, for which we managed to find those responsible for IT and customers among the business).
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A lot or a little, it will be possible to judge after a detailed description of what is considered an IT system here.

Step one

First of all, all departments of the IT Directorate were requested to list the IT systems they support. Further, we started to combine all these lists together and make unified names and encodings. At the first stage, it was decided to divide the IT systems into three groups:

1. External services.
2. Information Systems.
3. Infrastructure services. This is the most interesting category. In the process of drawing up a list of IT systems, software products were found that use only infrastructure (for example, Active Directory (AD)), as well as software products that are installed on users' local machines. All these programs have been allocated to infrastructure services.

Let's take a closer look at each group.

External services

External services are IT systems that do not use our server infrastructure. A third-party company is responsible for their work. These are, for the most part, cloud services and external APIs of other companies (for example, payment and fiscalization services of checks). The term is debatable, but it was not possible to think of a better one. We recorded all borderline cases in “information systems”.

Information Systems

Information systems - installations of software products that the company uses. In this case, only software systems were considered that are installed on servers and provide interaction for many users. Local programs that are installed on employees' computers were not considered.
There were some subtle points:

1. For many tasks, micro-service architecture is used. Microservices are created on a common platform. We thought for a long time, to allocate each service or a group of services into separate systems. As a result, they took the whole platform as the system and called it MSP - Mvideo (micro) Service Platform.
2. Many IT systems use complex architecture from clients, server-side, databases, balancers, etc. We decided to merge all this into a single IT system, without isolating such technical parts as balancers, TOMCAT and much more.
3. Technical IT systems - such as AD, monitoring systems - were divided into a separate group of “infrastructure services”.

Infrastructure services

This includes systems that are used for the functioning of the IT infrastructure. For example:

• Access to Internet resources.
• Data archiving service.
• Backup service.
• Telephony.
• Video conferencing.
• Messengers.
• Active Directory Directory Service.
• Email service.
• Antivirus.

All programs that are installed on users' local machines, we refer to the "Workplace".

On the set of services the discussion is not over yet.

Result of the first step

After all the lists received from the departments were consolidated, we received a general list of the company's IT systems.

The list was one level, i.e. we did not have subsystems. Such a complication of the list was postponed for the future. All we got:

• 152 information systems and external services.
• 25 infrastructure services.

A huge advantage of this directory is the fact that in addition to the list of IT systems, they agreed on a list of responsible employees for each of them.

Step Two

The list had a number of flaws:

1. It turned out to be flat and not completely balanced. For example, the store system was represented in the list by 8 separate modules or systems, and the site by one system.
2. The question remained, did we receive a complete list of IT systems?
3. How to keep the list up to date?

Transition from the single-level list to the two-level

The main improvement that was made in the second stage is the transition to a two-level list. Two concepts were introduced:

• IT system.
• IT system module.

We attributed to the first not only separate installations, but logically related systems. For example, previously the web reporting system (SAP BO), ETL and the repositories were on the list of separate IT systems, and now we have combined them into one system with 10 modules.

After similar transformations, 115 IT systems remained in the catalog.

Search for unaccounted IT systems

We solve the problem of searching for unaccounted IT systems by allocating costs to IT systems. Those. The company created a system for distributing all payments of the department to IT systems (for more details on this, see the next article) Now we review monthly the list of IT payments and refer them to IT systems. At the very beginning, a number of paid systems were found that did not appear in the registry.

The next step is the introduction of a unified IT architecture platform (EA Tool) for development planning.

Classification of IT systems

In addition to compiling a list of IT systems and identifying responsible employees, we began to classify IT systems.

The first classification attribute we introduced is the life cycle stage. Thus, a single list of systems that are being implemented and planned for decommissioning has appeared.

In addition, we began to track vendor's life cycle of IT systems. It is no secret that software products have different versions, and suppliers support only certain of them. After analyzing the list of IT systems, there were identified those whose versions are no longer supported by the manufacturer. Now there is a big discussion of what to do with such programs.

Using the list of IT systems

What we use this list for:

1. In the IT architecture, when drawing the solution landscape, we use common names for IT systems.
2. In the system of distribution of payments for IT systems. So we see the total costs for them.
3. We are rebuilding ITSM in order to maintain information in each incident on which IT system the incident was detected in and in which it was resolved.

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Since the list of IT systems is confidential information, it is impossible to bring it in full here, we will show the visualization.

On the picture:

• Green are modules of IT systems.
• Other flowers departments DIT.
• IT systems are tied to the managers responsible for them.