A Roadmap for Modernisation and Application Transformation

The South Australian Tertiary Admissions Centre (SATAC) is responsible for assessing students’ academic and non-academic qualifications and ranking eligible applicants for tertiary education courses.

As a part of their strategic plan, SATAC was seeking integration to create new and innovative ways to drive greater efficiency and unlock new value in the student admissions process. A key pillar in their technology strategy is the delivery of a holistic capability, which sits at a key juncture in enabling other projects to be delivered at future time horizons.

As a trusted technology partner to SATAC Chamonix was engaged to assist SATAC with a roadmap to modernise their systems in line with their technology strategy.

Addressing aging platforms to pave the way for their modern transformation was a key part of this initiative with the main focus being their ‘Applicant Success’ portal which is a core element of the business’ operations. Chamonix was engaged to advise and subsequently enable the transformation of their application.

SATAC’s Applicant Success portal is to be the primary platform utilised by secondary, tertiary and post graduate students to apply to study at tertiary institutions in South Australia.

Key benefits SATAC were seeking to achieve included:

• Better visibility of the application and offer processes for students and staff
• Dynamic branding for institutions through white labelling providing a better user experience with their systems and processes
• Responsive and contemporary user interfaces accessible across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices
• Increased security posture in line with evolving threat landscape
• Modern technology platform to:
  • Reduce the cost of development and maintenance
  • Increase the accessibility of skilled staff within the marketplace
  • Increase platform longevity
• Cloud first approach including reduction of operational costs

Our Approach

Chamonix was initially engaged to review the existing application landscape at SATAC. As part of this review Chamonix assessed:

• Application catalogue
• Development and deployment methodologies
• Documentation and on-going maintenance and support
• Technical capabilities within SATAC’s team

As part of this review SATAC were seeking to understand what capability gaps existed within their team and what approaches could be utilised in order to provide upskilling of SATAC’s workforce.

A hybrid team approach was taken for the design, development, and delivery of the new application. Core outcomes SATAC were looking to achieve from this approach included:

• Establishing a best practices approach to agile software development
• Introduction and incorporation of DevOps practices within the application development and operations teams at SATAC
• Upskilling SATAC personnel in cloud technologies, development methodologies and frameworks

Our Recommendation & Solution

As part of our Hybrid team approach, Chamonix and SATAC developed a scoping and implementation plan identifying the core components to be implemented to enable the realisation of the Benefits.

These were:

• Development of a new Angular front web application
• Establishment of a new identity management and contemporary authentication system
• Establishment of a new API management practices through APIM and Azure App Services

In order to deliver value quickly and enable the development team to focus on the core outcomes SATAC and Chamonix introduced a modern API layer incorporating additional security controls and support for consumption by modern web application frameworks.

Chamonix worked with SATAC on a dynamic resourcing model to ensure that SATAC had access to the required skills as needed. Chamonix was responsible for cloud architecture, application design and development leadership, working closely with SATAC to support their development and QA teams and taking direction from SATAC’s application owner and SME’s.

This project represented a significant shift in the way application development and maintenance was performed by SATAC. Core to this was the introduction of a DevOps approach and associated practices focusing on automation, standardisation and consistency particularly in relation to patching, configuration and deployment.