Date of Award

Spring 4-1-2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS)

First Advisor

Mark Moran

Second Advisor

Richard Christoph

Third Advisor

Stephen Kresbach

Abstract

The Subject Company has migrated from a Mainframe shop to a Microsoft Client Server development shop over the past 15 years. As new projects come up, development teams would look towards the client server development opportunities first to create and maintain the systems. Over these 15 years, the Subject Company accumulated 132 custom application servers. Each was configured to the current Subject Company standards at the time of purchase, with minimal upgrades occurring after purchase. Therefore, the Subject Company had no standard server configuration for their custom application servers. The variety of server configurations increases maintenance costs and support costs. To alleviate this the Stability Planning project was created to enforce all custom application servers to operate under the standard configuration, operating system (Windows 2003), service pack (SPl) and framework (2.0 .Net framework), and standard security guidelines. The project's goal was to utilize Windows Server 2003, when compared to the previous Windows 2000 environment will achieve an increase in performance up to 66%. Consolidation of server pools, which perform similar business needs, and elimination of servers with no back up servers were also considered to improve the Subject Company's information technology environment. Obstacles to potential success included hardware and software costs, a performance concern resulting in a reduction of server consolidation goals, a lack of a quality measurement set within the project, a reduction of servers from scope since features of their specialized software would not operate with the new server configuration, a reduction of scope in the Electronic Data Interchange servers as these servers were reclassified as non-custom application servers, complications with the code move process on previous projects affecting consistency in code between servers and complicating elimination efforts, and several items uncovered during testing that indicated application failures due to changes in .Net framework operations increasing budget. Although the Stability Planning project is considered a successful project, lessons learned during the Stability Planning project were related to server elimination costs, implementation resources, change request management and realistic critical success factors.

Comments

dsu-th-094

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