Federal Office of Administration

01. challenges

By taking over central cross-divisional tasks, the BVA promotes the concentration of the federal authorities on their core tasks and at the same time contributes to greater quality and efficiency in public administration. With its consulting and coaching services for other authorities and institutions in the areas of strategic management, organization, personnel and information technology, the Federal Office of Administration plays a decisive role in the modernization of the administration. In these areas, the company provides its own IT products, such as the document management and workflow system FAVORIT®, the knowledge management system and employee portal OfficeNet (ON), the Government Site Builder and the electronic personnel, organization and job management system EPOS.

The BIT therefore placed high demands on the BVA monitoring system to be implemented. What was required was both uniform, platform-independent monitoring and the ability to integrate new processes quickly and in a standardized way. In particular, the integration of additional IT management tools was necessary, such as HP OpenView Service Desk, HP Network Node Manager, UC4 and EMC SAN Management.

In particular, when implementing the technical requirements, the – sometimes individual – wishes of the system administrators and – for the area of reporting – of course also those of the employees in the specialist departments and customers should be taken into account in order to achieve the greatest possible user acceptance and satisfaction with results among these groups. This was made possible, among other things, by the monitoring information portal (MIP) developed in the further course of the project – which also provides a comprehensive insight into the current architecture and status of the entire IT infrastructure, not only for the aforementioned group of people, but also for the management of the company.

02. solutions

As part of the reorganization of its IT service management, the Federal Office for Information Technology – in cooperation with NETWAYS – first converted the company-wide monitoring system to an open source solution and, in a second step, developed a web-based monitoring information portal that expands and simplifies the operation of the monitoring software. This means that a large number of users can now call up web-based information tailored to their needs. What was required was both uniform, platform-independent monitoring and the ability to integrate new processes quickly and in a standardized way. In particular, it was necessary to connect additional IT management tools.

NETWAYS carried out the basic installation of the monitoring software server for Erste. In line with the team-oriented structure of IT operations, Windows, Solaris and Linux were not integrated into the monitoring system on a platform-specific basis, but gradually. The monitoring of applications specially tailored to BVA was also transferred to the new system. The alarm system was then installed, which notifies the teams by phone call, text message or e-mail in the event of a fault.

03. success

Monitoring Software Implementation at the Federal Office of Administration All open source components used, including the extensions developed by BIT in cooperation with NETWAYS, are licensed under the General Public License. Other users were also given the opportunity to use and further develop these free of charge. The MIP is constantly being expanded to include additional information options, so that a comprehensive reporting system is now also integrated alongside an inventory solution and a system management tool. Depending on requirements and in close consultation with the users, additional extensions will follow.