Easing the migration process
The Business
CenterPoint Energy has remained a leader in its industry for over 100 years. It is one of the top three largest publicly
traded combined electricity and natural gas delivery companies in the U.S., with millions of metered electric and natural
gas customers nation-wide. CenterPoint Energy provides electricity transmission and distribution service for the Houston
metropolitan area and is one of the largest energy employers in Houston.
The Challenge
In March of 2005 CenterPoint announced plans to migrate from Novell and Notes to a Microsoft platform, including Exchange
for messaging and Active Directory for user authentication to the companies network. CenterPoint engaged CPSG to formulate
a solution for this migration. In addition to the communication and collaboration migration effort CPSG also needed to develop
a strategy that would allow enterprise-wide management of logical user ID’s while providing a central solution for de-provisioning
across both the new and the legacy systems before October 1st of 2005.
How CPSG Consultants Helped
After a comprehensive review of all the client’s customers over all business objectives, CPSG facilitated an architecture
review and assessment workshop with the support of the client’s Microsoft migration team. Based on findings from the workshop,
an end-to-end Identity Management (IdM) assessment was proposed in the form of CPSG’s packaged IdM RoadmapTM. CPSG was engaged
to execute the roadmap for all corporately managed systems and applications that impact the client’s financials. This project
was delivered on time and with in the initial project budget.
Phase 1- Initial Platform
- IdM definition and evaluation
- Analysis of current processes and Change Remove Update and Disable (“CRUD”) strategy
- Defining future IdM related processes and strategy
- IdM product evaluation and architecture
- Vendor POC’s
- IdM RACF assessment and cleanup
- Design enterprise IdM platform
- Deliver the proposed solution
Ultimately during this phase CPSG was able to assist the customer in identifying, testing, and recommending enterprise IdM
software solutions to manage users’ accounts in the company’s financial applications.
Phase II- Future Considerations
Because of the success of the initial project and CPSG’s ability to deliver with qualified consultants, the client has now
engaged CPSG to assist them in defining their future role based access control (RBAC) strategy. This includes a “bottom-up”
extraction of roles from existing applications and systems, as well as a “top-down” business process mapping of roles within
the client company. In addition the client has also requested CPSG to assist them in understanding how to build enterprise
Business Process Models (BPM) for their critical business functions, including material financial systems.
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