Discover Case Study: Health Care Giant McKesson Harnesses HP ALM for Data Center Transformation and Dev-Ops Performance Improvement

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

We're now going to focus on McKesson Corp., and how they're improving their operations and reducing their mean time to resolution. We'll also explore applications quality assurance, test, and development, and how they're progressing toward a modernization front on those efforts as well.

We might even get into a bit of how these come together for an application lifecycle management and dev-ops benefit. Here to help us understand these issues better -- and their experience and success -- is Andy Smith, Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Welcome, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Welcome, Doug.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics.

Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: First, we might want to get people familiar, if they are not already, with McKesson. Andy Smith, tell us a little bit about McKesson, the type of organization you are, and the extent. It’s quite a large organization you have for IT activities there as well.

Andy Smith: McKesson is a Fortune 15 healthcare company primarily in three areas: nurse call centers, medical pharmaceutical distribution, and a healthcare software development company.

Gardner: And, you have a very large and distributed IT organization. I've heard about it before, but let’s go through that a little bit again if you don’t mind.

Andy Smith: It’s a very federated model. Each business unit has its own IT department responsible for the applications, and in some cases, their own individual data centers. Through Doug’s data center transformation program, we've been migrating those data centers into fewer corporate locations, and I'm responsible for running the infrastructure in those corporate locations.

Gardner: Andy, tell us about what you've been doing in order to get to faster time to market for your services, meeting your service level agreement (SLA) obligations internally, and how you reduce your meantime to resolution. What’s been the story there?

Improving processes

Andy Smith: What we've been doing over a little more than two years is improving our processes into ITIL v3. We focused heavily on change management, event management, and configuration management. At the same time, in parallel, we introduced the HP Tool Suite, for monitoring and configuration management, asset management, and automation.

What we've seen through the improvement in the processes and the improvement in the tools has been a marked improvement in all of our metrics. We've seen a drop in our Tier 1 outages of 54 percent during the last couple of years, as we implemented this tool. We've got three years worth of metrics now, and every year, the metrics have declined compared to the prior year. We've also seen an 86 percent drop in the breaches of those Tier 1 SLAs.

Gardner: That’s very impressive. Doug Smith, tell us what you've been doing with data center transformation and how you're working toward a higher level of quality with the test development and the upfront stages of applications?

Doug Smith: Well, Dana, we've been on this road of transformation now for about three and a half years. In the beginning, we focused on our production environments, which generally consist of fairly predictable workloads across multiple business units, and as Andy mentioned, quite a variety actually of models. In the past, the business units have obtained a great deal of autonomy in how they manage their infrastructure.

The first thing was to pull together the infrastructure and go through a consolidation exercise, as well as an optimization of that infrastructure. There we focused heavily on virtualization, as well as optimization of our storage environment, and to Andy’s point around process, heavily invested in process improvement.

We look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.

A couple of years into this, we began to look at our development environment. McKesson has several thousand developers globally, and these developers spread across multiple product sets in multiple countries.

If you think about our objectives around security, quality, and agility, we look to continue to take advantage, both from an infrastructure perspective as well as a tools perspective, in how we can facilitate our developers through a more rapid development cycle, more securely, and with higher quality outcomes for our customers.

Gardner: So, it sounds as if both of you have relied increasingly on automation and integration and federation for many of the products that support these activities. Is there anything in particular, at a philosophical level, about why managing and governing across multiple products, but with governance or management capabilities is so important? Let’s start with you, Andy.

Andy Smith: When we first started looking at new tools, we recognized that we had a lot of point solutions that may have been best-in-breed, but they were a standalone solution. So, we weren’t getting the full benefits of the integration. As we looked at the next generation of tools, we wanted a tool suite that was fully integrated, so that the whole was better than the sum of the parts is probably the best way to put it.

We felt HP had progressed the farthest of all the competition in generating that full suite of tools to manage a data center environment. And, we believe we're seeing the benefits of that, because all these tools are working together to help improve our SLAs and shorten those mean time to restore.

Gardner: Doug Smith, any thoughts on that same level of the whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Governance in place

Doug Smith: Absolutely. It's not unique, but to a large business like McKesson, as a federation, we have businesses that retain their autonomy and their decision-making. The key is to have that governance in place to highlight the opportunity at an enterprise level to say that if we make the investments, if we coordinate our activities, and if we pull together, we actually can achieve outcomes greater than we could individually.

Gardner: Doug Smith, you've been using the application development function as a first step towards a larger data center transformation effort, and you've been an early adopter for that set of application.

At the same time, Andy Smith has been involved with trying to make operations run more smoothly. Do these come together? Is there a better ability to create an end-to-end process for development and operations and perhaps provide a feedback loop among and between them.

This is sort of dev-ops question. Andy Smith, how does that strike you? Is there something even greater, maybe perhaps a greater whole among the sum of even more parts?

Andy Smith: I believe so, because for the products that McKesson develops and sells to the healthcare industry, in many cases, we're also hosting them within our data centers as an application service provider.

I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.

And the bigger sum of the whole to me is the fact that I can take the testing scripts that were used to develop the products and use those in the BAC Suite to test and monitor the application as it runs in production. So, we're able to share that testing data and testing schemas in the production world to monitor the live product.

Gardner: Doug Smith, thoughts on the same dev-ops benefit? How does that strike you?

Doug Smith: As you look across product groups and our ability to scale this, and with Andy’s capability that he is developing and delivering on, you really see an opportunity for a company like McKesson to continue to deliver on its mission to improve the health of the businesses that we serve in healthcare. And, we can all relate to the benefits of driving out cost and increasing efficiency in healthcare.

So, at the highest level, anything that we can do to facilitate a faster and more agile development process for the folks who are delivering software and services in our organization, as well as help them provide a foundation and a layer where then they can talk to each other and build additional services and value-added services for our customers on top of that layer, then we have something that really can have an impact for all of us.

Gardner: Well, very good. Thank you for sharing that. I want to thank our guests. We've been here talking about the benefits of better tools for operations, as well as application development and hosting, and sharing their experience has been Andy Smith. He is the Vice President of Application Hosting Services at McKesson. Thanks so much, Andy.

Andy Smith: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Doug Smith, Vice President of Data Center Transformation at McKesson. Thank you, Doug.

Doug Smith: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how McKesson has migrated data centers into fewer locations, while improving overall metrics of applications performance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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