[Practical Record] Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG's IT Informationization Advancement Path

[51CTO.com original article] China's business travel market is developing rapidly and has been pursuing more effective travel management methods. In recent years, the Sino-British joint venture Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG Business Travel Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG) has introduced internationally advanced management concepts and technologies through continuous efforts, and relied on the strong IT technical support provided by the IT operation and maintenance department to ensure the smooth implementation of the company's informatization process, helping the company gain market opportunities.

It is reported that Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG Business Travel Co., Ltd. is jointly invested by Shanghai Jinjiang Group and British HRG (Hogg Robinson Group). Among them, HRG is a large multinational company with more than 160 years of travel service experience. Its global network covers more than 120 countries and focuses on the research and development of business travel services, travel expense management and business travel data management.

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In mid-March, Jin Yongjie, the IT director of Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG, came to Beijing on a business trip. 51CTO reporters took this opportunity to communicate with him. He has worked for American Express and China International Travel Service and has more than ten years of experience in IT operation and maintenance. In 2013, Jin Yongjie joined Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG.

Outdated and insufficient hardware resources affect the process of informatization

Although it was our first meeting, we were like friends who had not seen each other for a long time and had a very good chat. Talking about the information construction of Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG in recent years, Jin Yongjie said that this started from the year he first joined Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG. He still remembered that when he first joined, the engineer of the IT operation and maintenance department found him in a hurry and told him a bad news: the hard disk space of the mail server could only last for one month at most. After one month, it would have to face the situation of insufficient hard disk space and unable to receive new emails. At that time, the business department refused to free up hard disk space by deleting old emails, otherwise it would cause accounts receivable problems. The server has no redundancy and no backup, and if a new upgrade plan is adopted, it needs to be submitted to the UK HRG for approval, which will take at least 4 months to get approved.

At the same time, the company has a total of 35 physical servers and 4 storage devices to support 11 application systems, 8 of which are so old that even suppliers cannot be found, and all servers and storage devices are approaching the 5-year elimination red line.

In addition, the company's IT department has 18 employees with a loose management structure. Business needs and system equipment management cannot be taken into account at the same time. Every technician is very busy, putting out fires everywhere, and the efficiency of handling problems is extremely low, and even errors will occur.

It is precisely because of this opportunity that the informatization of Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG has stepped onto a new level.

Advanced upgrades start with infrastructure changes

When all these urgent problems were reported to the management of Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG, they truly realized the importance of improving the level of informatization. Therefore, the management immediately decided to start with the basic architecture change.

First, for hardware resources, the company established a baseline based on existing server resources. All heterogeneous, non-X86 standard equipment with processing power and upgrade capabilities below the baseline will be phased out within six months. After being phased out, a rental-instead-purchase approach will be adopted to establish a virtualized server cluster in the shortest possible time to migrate applications. Ultimately, within a year, the original 35 physical servers and 4 storage devices were replaced with a virtual server cluster consisting of 6 physical servers and 2 storage devices.

Secondly, the company created a "medical record card" for each application, recording the daily operations and problem-solving experience of the personnel to solve the current problems. In addition, HRG also developed a life cycle plan for each application, merging or replacing applications that were not supported by the vendor or could not support future business development, reducing the total number of enterprise applications.

Third, the issue of human resources needs to be considered from the perspectives of cost and capability. Enterprises cannot require all employees to reach the expert level. Different personnel have different characteristics, and the resources and energy invested by enterprises in them will also be different. In the final analysis, the cost of a team of all experts is too high, and most enterprises cannot maintain it. Therefore, in the training and career path planning of personnel, it is necessary to be purposeful and guiding, and divide the personnel into the first-line, second-line and expert groups. Jin Yongjie said that before, every technician in the company did the same thing, and everyone was a firefighter. When new IT problems arise, whoever is free will deal with it. As a result, the problem handling time is very long and user satisfaction is low. This also affects the morale of employees in the IT department, and the turnover rate is very high, forming a vicious circle. Now this grading method, through training, helps technicians improve their technical capabilities and their own value, while also helping companies save employment costs and improve IT operation and maintenance efficiency.

***, business-oriented, implement ITIL standards. Jin Yongjie said that in IT operation and maintenance, the company chose to use ITIL standards. The reason for this is that business is very important to the company, and now many businesses must be completed with the help of technical means, such as working remotely, recommending products or services to customers across the country and even around the world, etc. In this case, the quality of customer service is directly affected by the IT system, so IT service management has become an indispensable part of the business operation process of the enterprise.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of practice guidelines widely used for effective IT service management. Its core idea is to understand IT service requirements from a business rather than a technical perspective. In other words, when providing IT services, we should first consider business needs and determine IT needs based on business needs. The business management module guides business managers to analyze IT problems with their own habitual thinking patterns, gain a deep understanding of the ability of IT infrastructure to support business processes, and the role of IT service management in providing end-to-end IT services, so as to help them better handle the relationship with service providers and help them obtain business benefits. In addition, when enterprises or other organizations implement ITIL, they can concretize the standards and establish their own methodology. When enterprises use the processes and best practices provided by ITIL for internal IT service management, they can not only provide users with satisfactory services to improve customer experience, but also ensure that the process is cost-effective, reduce the occurrence of unexpected problems, and reduce business losses caused by system failures.

Further advancement: cloud computing + hyper-convergence keeps pace with the development of the times

It is not enough to simply achieve virtualization. With the continuous development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, and the rising popularity of hyper-converged architecture, Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG has also kept pace with the times, using the Alibaba Cloud platform to move its business to the cloud, and has also moved towards hyper-convergence by applying Sangfor products.

Why choose to go to the cloud? The cloud is profoundly changing the development pattern of the information industry. IT architecture based on cloud computing has become a new form of enterprise IT for the future.

On the one hand, from a business perspective, in a traditional data center environment, 92% to 95% of resources are locked when the application is launched, and only 5% to 8% of resources can be flexibly allocated throughout the life cycle. Cloud computing can help enterprises achieve flexible matching of resources and applications. In a cloud data center, hardware and applications show a weak binding relationship, and more than 95% of resources can be dynamically allocated during their life cycle, which not only achieves the reuse of existing equipment, but also supports more businesses. This means the maximum use of resources. On the other hand, if Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG can combine PaaS platform technology with cloud data centers, it can quickly implement the deployment of application environments and achieve agile development, agile delivery, and agile operation and maintenance. Jin Yongjie said frankly that the reason for choosing the Alibaba Cloud platform is that Alibaba Cloud is a local cloud platform in my country with rich technical accumulation; secondly, it is because of cost considerations.

Speaking of hyper-converged architecture, Jin Yongjie believes that the use of hyper-converged architecture can effectively reduce the company's overall cost of ownership. The company does not need to purchase servers, storage, networks and other hardware facilities separately. Hyper-converged architecture can also greatly shorten the time to application delivery. In terms of scalability, hyper-converged architecture can easily achieve horizontal expansion.

Therefore, the future enterprise IT architecture will be a situation where public cloud and private cloud based on hyper-convergence coexist, that is, private cloud will provide services for enterprise core applications to solve data security issues; public cloud will solve data concurrency, external resource calls, and network performance issues. Jin Yongjie smiled and said that this is like the layout of the Heavenly King Hall in a temple, with the solemn and mighty Weituo Bodhisattva (private cloud) facing the inside and the smiling and popular Maitreya Bodhisattva (public cloud) facing the outside.

Interview Postscript

In the digital information age, the more enterprises embrace Internet technology, the more efficient their operations will be, which will eventually translate into improved production efficiency. With the rapid development of cloud computing, hyper-convergence, big data and mobile Internet, enterprises will fall behind if they are not careful. If your human resources and cost budget are limited, if you are still using old equipment and traditional IT technology, you might as well actively embrace emerging technologies such as cloud computing and hyper-convergence like Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG. Perhaps they will help you see the moon after the clouds have cleared, and your business development will have a qualitative leap.

About Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG Business Travel Co., Ltd.

HRG (Haug Robinson Group) is a large multinational company with more than 160 years of experience in travel services, especially in providing corporate travel services for nearly 60 years. Its business scope includes travel arrangements, follow-up services, consulting, cost saving management, sports events and exhibition management. In 25 major growth-driving markets throughout Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, HRG provides services to our customers in the form of wholly-owned and holding companies. Through strong partners, HRG's global network covers 123 countries.

Shanghai Jinjiang International HRG mainly provides business travel management services for enterprises, including international and domestic air ticket booking and ticketing, 24-hour emergency services, VIP services, hotel reservations, conference services, airport services, visa processing, related travel arrangements, and travel expense management consulting and services. The company's mission is to provide high-quality business travel services to business customers across China and to help enterprises reduce travel costs through efficient travel expense management.

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]