Arcihitecture Discovery Offers Comprehensive Platform Description, Addresses Business Requirements
Business Challenge
The majority of the websites were developed without a centralized strategy and technological approach. Each division used various approaches (outsourcing, internal team development, etc.), different technologies (PHP, .NET, and Java), and platforms (Drupal, WordPress, and others).
This approach made it difficult for the client to gain efficiencies in time to market, implementation costs, maintenance costs, and overall quality of the existing websites. The situation led the client to select a platform for the global teams to streamline the website development approach and improve the overall position.
Additional business challenges for the website migration and platform development were industry specific and related to business governance limitations. As part of the platform unification, the team decided to improve the technical and business constraints to address PHI/PII data, site isolation and control, standardize the content review and publishing process, improve administrative personnel usability, and security (SSO, UX). The new platform needed to be integrated with the secure infrastructure platform the client implemented to host public facing, sensitive applications.
Project Description
SoftServe consulted with the client on the discovery project and focused on two primary areas:
- Architectural discovery and design for the platform and website migration
- Scope analys is and requirements definition for the pilot site’s migration and a high-level analysis of the website portfolio
The architectural discovery project was executed using SoftServe’s proprietary method based on the SEI Attribute-Driven Design methodology and was led by a team of three architects.
- Senior solutions architect—a generalist responsible for overall project execution and coordination of the discovery team
- Web CMS architect—subject matter expert in the CMS system being considered for the platform implementation
- DevOps architect—subject matter expert in the operational part of the solution including development lifecycle practices and the operational platform
The discovery project was completed by the SoftServe team within a five-week time period. In the first week, which was offsite, the team analyzed requirements and technical documentation and finalized the agenda and scope through conference calls with key stakeholders. During the next two weeks a series of onsite meetings, interviews, and brainstorm sessions occurred with business and technical personnel. The final two weeks were dedicated to finalizing deliverables, creating a presentation highlighting the results, and hosting a series of follow-up clarification meetings with the divisions impacted by or participating in the platform development and approval process.
Value Delivered
SoftServe successfully completed the discovery project and provided a comprehensive description of the platform needed to address the client’s business and quality requirements.
The proposed approach built the platform based on the CMS distribution model and containerization technology for individual site isolation and improved operational efficiency. The proposed approach fully met the client’s security requirements and fit within the internally built secure operational environment.
A set of new technologies was introduced in order to achieve better control over the site and to improve resource efficiency for the underlying computational resources. The proposed standardized approach of work with PHI/PII data for the public facing business sites addressed security concerns and provided additional business opportunities for the client by centralizing information for analytical and exploration purposes.
As a result of the project, the client made the decision to use the proposed approach to develop pilot sites as a short-term goal. After validation the existing websites would be migrated to the new platform.