Creating a Scalable IT Infrastructure
by Regis Pourchet
As your company grows the technology surrounding it grows with it.
In 2018, we began working on our strategic plan that would inform how we would support our business’s current information technology needs, while having the capacity to be scaled as our business continued to grow.
Our goals were anything but simple. First, we needed IT infrastructure that provided transactional efficiency, digital optimization, cutting edge IT to our operations, and fully integrated solutions that could be scalable during busy seasons and as our business continued to grow throughout North America. We also wanted to enable our customers to help themselves with self-service options. This is where agile methodology came into practice.
In software development, agile approaches develop requirements and solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers. Agility is the ability to continuously adapt and constantly make improvements to the way you work.
Our next step was to separate the support side of our business with the development side. This way we could ensure our users get help with any issues they come across without halting progress on the development of new software solutions.
Since we work in a seasonal business with spring and summer months being our busiest times of year, agile accounted for this and allowed us to take advantage of fall and winter months to deliver more to the business.
Through the use of Datamart, Datalake, cubes and PowerBI, Colas ISS has been able to deliver self-service options by creating customizable dashboards that the business can manipulate to fit their specific reporting needs. This gives our users better reporting tools which allows them to see where they’re doing well and where they need to make necessary changes.
In recent years we have established a Quality Assurance department that helps reduce and monitor production issues allowing for more scalability.
Our next step in this ongoing process is product management and product road mapping with the use of Aha. A product roadmap outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. Product management involves guiding the success of the product roadmap.
Aha is intended to help drive our end user’s ideas forward so we work on issues that are most important to our users and prioritizes that work accordingly.