Follow the sun continued

Inefficient use of resources

Follow the sun allows a more dynamic IT support model, one where we can share at the very least first and maybe second line support overnight allowing your local team to be on call, but at the same time not be up all night unnecessarily if the issue can be dealt with by whoever is working at that part of the business day.

Poor Global Support

Often a system might have dependencies on systems in other locations, for example, the London batch might be dependent on the Singapore system being available, often you might find that the application teams have access to the systems in Singapore, but the infrastructure don’t, so when the system goes down, someone in Singapore has to be paged, causing delays to the resolution time. If I had the password/access, I might be able to log on and check what’s going on, do my best to stabilize the platform for the time being.
 
Everybody thinks local

IT thinks differently in different locations, which makes deploying systems that bit harder, the fact that Singapore might use Hitachi storage, or they don’t buy HP, they buy Dell, makes the support, the project implementation that bit harder, and standards might vary between sites. By bringing the IT teams together in a follow the sun model, we can’t change everything and make everything equal, but we can move towards a standardised approach, an agreed way of building a cluster, how we deploy, and build blades. The idea being that if Capital Markets request a blade in London, it should be as close to identical as the blade in Singapore.