Mark was employed to lead the technical team of a Siebel 7.7 Life Sciences application. This implementation's primary function was to collate and manage information on Global Key Opinion Leaders (gKOLs) and make this information available to users who would typically log in very infrequently.

Astra Zeneca have a number of systems globally that hold information on these gKOLs, consequently a number of interfaces were developed to pull data from these systems to provide a unified view of the gKOLs and their activities. These interfaces used a mixture of EAI technologies including external business components, Web Services and COM. Since the majority of users were infrequent users the information had to be presented in a very simple and easy to use user interface. This resulted in a number of changes to web templates and heavy use of scripting to make the user experience as simple as possible.

Mark joined towards the end of the development of phase 2 and was initially responsible for the roll out of this release into System Test, UAT and Production environments. This release had not be planned particularly well and so Mark sought to introduce controls to manage future roll outs, including the introduction of a fully documented release plan and use of source control software (VSS) to manage files and information required for roll out.

Although the management of the production and pre-production environments was the responsibility of the outsourced IT department, the system administration of production was the responsibility of the development team. This had been largely neglected during the previous 6 months, since first going live, consequently no one had noticed that the majority of interfaces, a key element of this implementation, had not been running. Mark therefore introduced formal documentation and processes for managing the production environment to ensure that everything ran as smoothly as possible, not just for the interfaces, but for all elements of the implementation.

There were also a number of issues with the various development environments. The Production and UAT environments were properly managed by the outsourced IT department, but the various development boxes (development, system test, training, etc) were not managed at all. Consequently each environment had a slightly different build, and over time changes were made to each environment without any controls to ensure they were all kept in synch. Nor was any documentation kept to identify what changes had been made. The result was a number of different environments with slightly different builds which caused a large number of issues. Eventually it was decided that the effort involved in fixing these issues was too great and a complete rebuild would be more beneficial in the long term. Mark therefore took responsibility for the specification and installation of a new development environment, and the rebuild of some of the other environments, ensuring that everything was fully documented and that future changes were properly managed and applied to all environments to keep them all in synch.

In addition to modifying web templates, heavy scripting and EAI, the implementation also used Siebel Analytics, Siebel Data Quality Manager, COM automation of Word, Excel and Outlook, and Siebel Remote.

Mark also provided his Import/Export spreadsheet (see the Import/Export page for details) which was used to extract and load data into the various environments, as well as provide a means for ad-hoc updates to production data.