622 Part IV • The Information Management System
state... the whole structure shook out over about
two months.
—Becky Robinson, Director of Systems
ManagementThe plans were incredibly detailed, and they were
written from an application-owner point of view.
The trick was to see the dependencies. The IT appli-
cations people knew those dependencies and were
able to align them with what they had to do.
—Allan Horn, Vice President, Technology
OperationsMove-element freeze policies (see Exhibit 9)
required that no application changes be implemented for a
2-week period prior to the move-element implementation
and for a 1-week period afterward. Infrastructure changes
were not allowed 4 weeks before the move element imple-
mentation and for a 1-week period afterward.
All plans, policies, timelines, progress reports, and
other relevant documents were coordinated by the FPMO
staff for each area of the integration. These documents
were then e-mailed to key managers and posted on Sallie
Mae Central, the company’s intranet. This provided com-
panywide access to the information needed by both IT and
business managers to manage the project effectively as
well as to manage ongoing operations.Equipment Move Strategies
One of the first steps in moving the data center was to
make decisions on how all of the equipment from Reston
would fit into the Indianapolis facility. A number of
approaches were used to redesign the space to accommo-
date the new equipment.Our first impression, and theirs, was “this will never
fit.” The Sallie Mae data center was the length of a
football field. Once we started doing floor plans, we
found that Sallie Mae was underutilizing their
space. We used a number of strategies here. We
eliminated local monitors and keyboards on storage
racks, for example. This saved a lot of space.
Replacing old equipment with smaller new equip-
ment helped too.
—Jon Jones, Director of Client Server ComputingExcellent vendor relationships were key to rational-
izing equipment, making infrastructure improvements, and
carrying out the project on time and within budget.Mainframe
Tandem
Network1) Define move element from the applications
point of view (vertical).
2) Then define from the infrastructure point
of view, to catch any gaps (horizontal).ApplicationsInfrastructureWired ScholarL!
OpenLineSSClassEXHIBIT 8 Move Element Definition Approach
One major difference between the approach adopted
by Sallie Mae and the approach introduced by their IT
consultants was that move elements were first identified,
and managed, from a business-application perspective,
rather than a technology-infrastructure perspective. As
described in Exhibit 8, the software application view pro-
vided a vertical business perspective, and the technology
infrastructure view provided a horizontal cross-application
perspective. Move elements were therefore managed as a
set of interdependent hardware and software components.
Large business applications were divided into smaller log-
ical move elements to better facilitate project planning and
move flexibility.
[The IT consultants] had us looking at this move
from a technology viewpoint. The way we looked at
it, the superstructure was the application. We defined
move elements as a set of hardware and/or software
components that can and should move together
because of interdependencies.
—John Bennett, Project Manager for Data Center
RelocationThe systems development people became the team
leads. They understood the dependencies, the inte-
gration points.... It was a hard decision to make,
and it was difficult to let someone else be in charge
of the data-center move. But it was critical that we
didn’t lose sight of the applications because they
were our primary concern. It then became our job to
focus on a higher level of coordination, resolving the
dependencies. It took time to get to an organized