Price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com has begun
reviewing the capacity of its hardware, bandwidth and IT staffing
levels every week to help it manage
the rapid expansion of its
business.
The company, which had a turnover of £108m last year, is
holding meetings every Friday to ensure that its website only uses
a fixed proportion of its IT capacity, as the number of customers
visiting its site increases.
The company, which employs 235 IT professionals, is planning to
complete a total of 96 IT projects by the end of the year to help
it manage the growth in its business.
It installed IBM Service Desk software at the end of March to
make it easier for IT managers to monitor how much IT capacity they
were using.
Chief technology officer Ron Scurr, who introduced the weekly IT
reviews when he joined Moneysupermarket.com last autumn, said, "I
can tell in real-time what temperature it is in each of the
cabinets in our remote-site comms room. I can see how much memory
is being used by each cluster."
The IT department has already decided to more than double
bandwidth and to hire an extra 53 IT staff to cope with the
increase in sales expected during 2007.
Using agile development techniques, IT teams deploy iterative
releases of software for each new project, which take between four
and 10 weeks to complete. Users give feedback on each iteration to
ensure that the final product closely matches business
requirements.
Moneysupermarket.com opened an additional IT operations centre
in Flintshire during March to cater for the growing numbers of
staff and servers.
The second datacentre gave the IT function round-the-clock
disaster recovery capability, which is helping it keep within the
business's maximum permitted downtime for the systems of nine
seconds a day.
The company introduced the IT Infrastructure Library methodology
late last year to help it manage the growing number of
projects.
XML links enhance online experience
Moneysupermarket.com has been establishing XML links with up to
10 insurance companies a week so that customers can buy insurance
policies more easily.
The XML links replace
screen-scraping technology, which used web
robots to extract data from the display output on insurance
companies' transactional websites.
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