Bharat Petroleum has a huge IT setup at its refinery. A plant monitoring
system supports over 150 online/OLTP transactions/MIS/ BI applications, and a
collaborative portal hosts these apps and helps in knowledge and information
management as well. In all, there are around 1,500 desktops, 60 high-end
servers, two SAN boxes, two data centers in the refinery and an offsite data
center. The total area is around 24 km, connected with 80 switches.
Project Specs | |
Business problem: Managing a huge infrastructure with only 18 people comprising the IT staff IT solution: Re-implementation of the project in accordance with Impact: A very small IT team is now capable of managing the huge Implementation partner: Inhouse |
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M D Agrawal, Chief Manager-IT |
To arrive at a standard operation procedure, BPCL required a set of
guidelines to streamline the IT setup. They opted for the COBIT compliance
guideline, and redeployed the setup in accordance with it. This helped enhance
the quality of IT service delivery for most of the company's processes such as
Service Level Management, IT Solution Acquisition, Project Management, IT Asset
Management, etc, and helped the refinery meet goals from a strategic
perspective. Twelve modules from COBIT were introduced, including BCP, IT
Security Framework, IT Asset Mgmt Framework, Incident Mgmt Process, Backup,
Storage and Media Mgmt Framework, Change Mgmt Process, etc.
A SharePoint portal is used to host, capture and archive all COBIT-related
documentation, transactions like incident reporting and change configuration.
The portal also archives daily logs and hardware performance status. It is,
therefore, an all-in-one archival and delivery system. Using a portal
facilitates the company to develop a rich knowledge base of IT processes and
incidents, and carry out proper knowledge management. Previously, all knowledge
about a particular process used to be with the person handling the process. If
that person left the company, the knowledge was lost making it difficult for
anyone new to adapt and understand these processes. With proper knowledge
sharing and archiving, and a fixed guideline for every process and proper
documentation, this problem has been solved.