BPCL-IT Governance Framework

Sunday, June 17, 2007

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.

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.

	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 COBIT guidelines Impact: A very small IT team is now capable of managing the huge infrastructure Implementation partner: Inhouse
M D Agrawal, Chief Manager-IT

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.

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