Openreach provides last mile network access services to millions of customers across the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. Openreach Field engineers install and maintain the physical network on behalf of 650+ communication providers (CPs) which sell services directly to end customers.
The Openreach Field team comprising 42,000+ systems engineers, field service professionals, managers, and support staff use the OR Informe (Openreach Information for me) portal for daily business operations.
INFORMe is a CAT1A business critical one stop application for Openreach engineers which facilitates their day to day work. It is a web-based portal that binds together applications used by the Field Force within Openreach. It brings together all the links to the online information used by systems engineers and their managers.
Key Challenges
The service desk staff faced several challenges:
- User experience challenge – Age old application with lot of redundancies and irrelevant functionalities built in over a period, impacting overall end user experience
- Compliance and process challenge - Manual process for granting access to applications caused delays and increased service request workloads
- Technology challenge - Legacy UI developed using ColdFusion lacked ability to scale, difficult to maintain and limited delivery speed to production
- EOSL challenge - Mission-critical systems (MS SQL 2005 DB Server and Remote Windows Server 2003) entered End of Service Life (EOSL) stage
- Business continuity challenge – no resiliency in the existing deployment architecture, high risk to service availability
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The Solution
Design-thinking led user experience enhancement leveraging new-age technologies
Infosys developed a user-centric system for Openreach’s field community. We undertook a digital transformation of the business critical OR Informe portal and enhanced application modules.
Our team reengineered the portal using microservice-based architecture, HTML/JS/ Angular 8 templates, and REST APIs. We adopted an empathy map for the technology uplift - from monolithic to microservices architecture.
We implemented an active-active infrastructure and a CI / CD pipeline. Wireframes and continuous user communication as well as timely feedback guided the design and development stages. Phased cutover of the applications and beta launches for users improved the UI, accelerated UAT, and ensured risk-free rollout of modules.
Significantly, it complies with quality standards and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework.
Infosys future-proofs OR Informe field force portal
Iterative prototyping, user collaboration, continuous feedback, and DevOps tools accelerated digital transformation of the OR Informe portal.
Our lean development methodology reduced effort and eliminated waste.
Technical enrichments designed by Infosys addresses the requirements of field engineers, patch managers, service desk teams, and business users.
Easy access to applications, data and systems empowers users to respond faster to business requests.
Benefits
Business
- Enhanced the user experience with an intuitive interface and human-centric design
- Mitigated business risks by eliminating EOSL software and tools, delivering Active-Active highly resilient architecture
- Rationalized costs by migrating to a scalable enterprise cloud infrastructure
Operational
- Ensured a seamless transition by developing proof-of-concept
- Accelerated development and rollout using advanced tools such as Mockito and Apache Maven
- Minimized workload through automated revalidation of users
Technical
- Streamlined the landscape by leveraging in-use platforms such as Oracle WebLogic
- Improved application maintainability, simplified IT landscape eliminating 9 modules/applications, DevOps based development methodology with a robust CI/CD pipeline
- Boosted security with integrated authentication and authorization
