Deconstructing Neste (cont.)

Some Disassembly Required

False Hope

"We thought, because the oil and electricity business units were already using separate applications-there was, for example, no SAP to be stripped out of here and put there-and because of our decision to continue outsourcing things like our IT infrastructure management to HP, that it would be relatively easy," Keskiivari says. "It wasn't until we split the two companies that we realized we underestimated the scope of the project."

What seemed simple at first-say, transferring an application from one organization's infrastructure to another-proved considerably more complex. "The separation itself went relatively smoothly. But finding all the small changes from one system to another was challenging," Keskiivari explains. "As the first phase, we began separating the two entities in January 2005, and the company split out on April 1, 2005. Those were some pretty hectic months, making it possible for the two companies to share the same environment while meeting all the compliance requirements from the OMXH.

"We ended up building an intranet portal and Internet pages for the new company. We took corporate financial reporting inside a special protective zone with additional layers of security for the companies to share. Then, we formed steering committees and drafted a contract between ourselves and Fortum outlining how to share joint assets and organize services during the separation phase. By managing the access rights so that all the users were in two totally separate groups, we were able to separate the critical IT systems, such as financial reporting."

With the intranet in place, everything else was scheduled to be completed in phases post-divestiture to minimize risk and mitigate impact to the business. But once the key components were separated, it became apparent to Keskiivari and his team that there was still much to do. "There were lots of touch points across the infrastructure we had yet to cover. And it didn't help that we were still in the middle of the outsourcing transition, two big changes going on at once."

With every challenge, an opportunity

Early on, it was clear that maintaining availability of the systems-avoiding disruption to the businesses-was going to be challenging. "We were touching virtually every piece of the infrastructure. We needed to find the right time to make the changes for each area of the business," Keskiivari says. "We needed to be sensitive to reporting needs and work around those requirements. That had to be guaranteed."

There were advantages to being on the Neste Oil side of the equation, Keskiivari explains. "We were able to adopt a lot of the standards and the platforms for the new organization from the existing ones at Fortum. That helped us minimize our risks and cut costs by not having to assign architects to build out those portions of the new infrastructure. We also had an opportunity, with new hardware and storage systems, to focus more on heterogeneous systems and to clean things up and simplify our infrastructure. By removing complexity, we gained availability."

Some of the solutions Keskiivari and his team didn't need to reinvent were the directory and the email systems. "But, because we established a new data center with about 100 new servers, we could do things like move to a tiered storage system to save money and improve efficiency. The business units' needs and business-criticality of the data helped us establish the storage hierarchies."

While most of Neste Oil's operations are based in Finland, the company (and its former parent company, Fortum) always had some offshore operations. "Some of our remote facilities were not using the same standards as we were here at headquarters. That made the divestiture a bit more difficult, but it gave us the opportunity to standardize those outlying facilities on the new platform."