Software Development

Turnover in IT support personnel caused many small businesses to lose time and money over gaps in historical knowledge of their technology. The loss was most severe when their IT systems were highly personalized by employee or consulting techs no longer with their company.

They needed a web accessible IT record that worked like a “patient chart,” where over time, a collaborative effort between IT consultants and employees could build a virtual profile of a the company's vital technology services.

As the central source of the company's IT knowledgebase, this "electronic technical record," among other things, would guide decision making, provide a snapshot of overall system health, track all system components, and enable quick recall of things that worked in the past to solve recurring problems.

Since no similar software existed for IT consultants at the time, IMR funded an in-house development project through several iterations of code to assemble an information tracking framework around a database and Wiki. It was available to IMR and customer techs through a secure online connection and able to accept input from PCs and cell phones from just about anywhere.

The application made IMR's consulting IT service catalog more effective and competitive by reducing the time it took to find answers, by continuously improving processes, by lowering customer's IT consulting costs and by educating customer staff on how to perform routine procedures on their own.

The effort enabled IMR's consulting team to quickly capture, organize and leverage all kinds of support details that cut customer support and operational costs. The results raised IMR's revenues by 15% in a business down-trend by reducing service errors and increasing overall customer support capacity with fewer staff.

A unique web service built from Open Source software that improved the business of an IT consulting company by collecting customer technical asset and service records in a secure online location.

My role

Product Sponsor and Project Manager leading team through all iterations of project from design criteria thru testing and deployment.

Prepared AutoCAD base drawings of customer sites and racks.

IT Services Software

Canby, OR - 2004 to 2007

"Information exposed during service could be collected and organized one day at a time to save on costs, or it could be collected in special initiatives that established a baseline of system health."

"The goal was one-click access to IT service assets, configurations, notes, procedures and resources that were stored in a database as text, photos, video clips, and recordings - one place for all agreements, warranties, licenses, policies, installed software, manuals, and service histories."

"The project collected IT system knowledge scattered around on desks, libraries, sticky notes, file cabinets, notebooks, trash cans, file servers and brains."

Details

This project emerged in1998 as a Microsoft Access / VB Script database.

It was moved to a PostgreSQL database with a Python front end rich client application and made web accessible through a project management and software bug tracking application called Trac.

It did more than track bugs though ... it tracked everything about IMR's customer services like assets, notes, images, photos, documents, voice recordings, and invoices. Moreover, it created an opportunity to hyperlink between things that made information that was fast to recall and easy to update.

It raised IMR's value to customers by revealing everything about what customers were getting from their consulting IT support team. It allowed customers to make healthier tech decisions, and it allowed them to focus more of their attention on core business competencies rather than the churn of their technology.

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