Background

This section explains the purpose of the proposed project and the status quo of the Woodgrove Bank’s IT infrastructure.

On This Page

Project Purpose
Current Situation
System and Management Architecture Overview
IT Organization

Project Purpose

The purpose of this project is to address the two main issues associated with desktop management at Woodgrove Bank. The first issue addresses Woodgrove’s multiple–operating-system platform, which is heavily reliant on technologies that were released to market five or more years ago. The second issue addresses the method of delivery, which must make the transition as smooth as possible. This project contains the “what” and the “how” for resolving both issues and incorporates the industry’s highest standards in technology and practices.

Woodgrove has historically been hesitant to update operating system and Microsoft Office applications on a schedule separate from hardware refresh cycles. Now that Woodgrove’s regional IT staff have become experts on the legacy platforms, there is added resistance to moving to a newer technology that is not as well known. But with nearly 3,870 computers still running Windows 2000 and soon facing end of support, the timing could not be better to migrate Woodgrove’s workstations to a Windows Vista–based environment. Office Enterprise 2007 and Windows Vista will increase Woodgrove’s productivity by enabling faster responsiveness, improved collaboration, and better information and workload management for users—all while providing a stable, manageable, and secure computing platform that minimizes downtime.

Past deployment efforts have been plagued by unforeseen application-compatibility problems, multilingual issues, reliability problems, user downtime, and increased post-deployment service pressure. Windows Vista was designed with ease of deployment in mind and improves upon all these issues. However, to keep all deployment burdens to a minimum, Microsoft has published a set of best practices for large-scale deployments of Windows Vista by using zero-touch deployment methods to achieve a seamless transition.

By using the guidance in the Solution Accelerator for BDD together with Windows Vista, Woodgrove can realize best results while utilizing existing staff. This solution provides the necessary guidance to appropriately plan and rigorously test all production attributes before the deployment takes place. Thorough planning and testing are the keys to a rapid and painless deployment.

Current Situation

This section shows the geographic profile of Woodgrove Bank and introduces representative locations for each office type: Enterprise Headquarters, Regional Headquarters, Autonomous Branch, and Microbranch.

Geographical Profile

Woodgrove Bank employs more than 15,000 people in 60 offices worldwide (Figure 1). Enterprise headquarters for Woodgrove is located in New York. The company has division headquarters located in London and Tokyo, and 57 offices located across the globe. Of those 57 offices, 13 are considered regional hubs and have server infrastructure and at least one full-time IT administrator on location. Ten of the locations are considered autonomous branch offices and include server infrastructure on location but no full-time IT staff. The remaining 34 branch offices are microbranches and do not have any server infrastructure or IT staff on location.

Figure 1. Woodgrove organization and connectivity

Computer Environment

All but a handful of employees at Woodgrove Bank have at least one computer. Most employees have workstations, while sales representatives have laptop computers. In total, Woodgrove has just over 17,000 user computers. Approximately 85 percent of those computers are workstations, 15 percent are laptop computers. More than 95 percent of the user computers are Intel-based computers running some version of the Windows operating system. There are a handful of Macintosh computers and a few UNIX computers being used by specific departments for LOB applications.

Standard Applications

Table 1 shows the standard software applications used by department.

Table 1. Standard Software Applications per Department

Software Distribution Totals

Table 2 shows the aggregate total of all production computers that belong to Woodgrove. Approximately 700 computers are assigned to senior executives and mobile consultants, but these computers are not subject to automated deployment procedures.

Table 2. Company Software Totals

System and Management Architecture Overview

Woodgrove’s network consists of IT zones: one corporate datacenter and two hub locations, two satellite offices, and a perimeter network to support offsite users. Woodgrove implements a centralized management model to manage servers and desktops centrally from New York City (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Architectural overview

IT Organization

This section explains Woodgrove Bank’s strategy on the centralization of the IT organization as well as the current IT budget.

Centralized/Decentralized

Woodgrove Bank IT operates primarily as a centralized organization. The majority of system planning and architecture is done by IT staff under WG Holding. However, all deployment, configuration, and day-to-day administrative tasks are performed by Woodgrove Bank’s IT Organization staff. Each headquarters location—New York, Tokyo, and London—is staffed with IT implementers, including infrastructure specialists, application specialists, and desktop administrators. Support operations are located in New York to provide centralized services.

Woodgrove Bank has 13 regional hub locations, all of which house server infrastructure and employ at least one IT professional. (Some locations have two or three IT professionals, depending on the number of servers on site.) The IT departments at these locations are responsible for all servers located in the hub offices and are considered IT generalists. They escalate connectivity issues and difficult infrastructure problems to a central IT department in New York.

IT Budget

Woodgrove spends more than $58 million each year on computer hardware, software, and telecommunications costs. In addition, because of their international presence and distributed nature, the company has over 1200 full-time IT personnel, which accounts for 65 percent of the total annual IT spending. Woodgrove’s total annual IT expense is nearly $163 million, which includes both IT personnel and IT budget costs. Woodgrove’s annual revenue is approximately $3.23 billion. IT spending is close to 5 percent of their annual revenue, whereas Gartner estimates that companies in the financial services vertical tend to spend 6.73 percent of their revenue on IT each year.

The following list shows Woodgrove’s budget breakdown for hardware, software, and telecommunications costs:

• Telephony (phones, local and long distance charges)—18%

• Computer hardware and software—33%

• Internet/intranet—10%

• Servers and networking equipment—29%

• IT service and support—10%

Large companies such as Woodgrove spend their IT budget on three types of applications, and they spend a much higher percentage on customized applications than on packaged applications:

• Packaged applications—$3.62 million

• Packaged applications that require customization—$5.14 million

• Custom applications—$3.68 million

Woodgrove also spends more than $16.8 million on server and networking equipment, with a large amount going to storage systems. A breakdown of spending for some of the larger line items is:

• Storage systems—$5.66 million

• Server hardware and operating system software—$4.66 million

• Routers, switches, and hubs—$2 million

• Network management tools—$1 million

Woodgrove Bank spent $5.8 million of its annual budget on hardware and software maintenance agreements, support contracts, and consulting assistance (Table 3). Consultants were used primarily to validate the security and develop or review the disaster recovery plans for Woodgrove’s IT infrastructure.  

Table 3. Total IT Spending for Woodgrove Bank

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