Case Study – ITES Industry

About the Client

A leading ITES organization, with global business interests, specializes in developing products that provide cutting edge information and insight to customers across all industries. The organization’s information technology is critical to the delivery of products to its customers. The organization is expanding its operations in India and therefore requires having its IT Operations streamlined to meet the critical demands of its users. As the complexity of the environment increases, so do the risks of incidents, problems and changes that have an impact upon Customer Service and the revenue stream of the organization.

Challenges faced

The organization’s IT architecture includes:

  • 100+ Servers (HP and IBM);
  • Storage Area Network – several Terabytes of Storage growing every day
  • Database Management Systems (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server);
  • Operating Systems (VM/VSE, Windows 2000, and several Linux flavors); and
  • 600+ desktops.

With the increase in services the organization’s incident, Configuration and change management processes were under pressure, not only continue to sustain the high level of availability required in this competitive environment, but also to provide this service cost-effectively. The immediate need was to handle the huge no. of incidents, changes, CMDB creation & server Management. A business case was developed to address a number of issues.

  • Clean up, the current issues
  • Scale up, to effectively manage 100% workforce growth for future
  • Develop cost effective management Model
  • Control IT operational costs and improve IT value through enhanced IT asset and cost management
  • Managing increasingly complex, multi-vendor, physical and virtual environments more easily and without draining the time and resources
  • Duplication of effort within existing processes;
  • No integrated, corporate wide incident, configuration and change management process;
  • No capture and analysis of incidents and associated trends;
  • To provide a lower cost of operations to the organization through the implementation of automation.

The business case put forward a number of strategic benefits of incident, configuration and change management processes including:

  • Increased protection for the IT infrastructure;
  • Increased service level, availability and customer delivery;
  • Strategic change in IT service management culture from reactive to proactive;
  • Significantly improved processes, which comply with a recognized best practice standard (ITIL); and
  • Significant savings in operational expense through the implementation of software to record, monitor and track incidents with configuration and change management.

The Need

It was recognised that there were two tactical enablers for the implementation of incident, configuration and change management. Adopt a process oriented approach based on ITIL guidelines and to select a software tool to enable the automation of the incident, configuration and change management. A number of options were considered:

An initial analysis was performed to identify software that would appear to meet the defined operational requirements. A number of products were identified and a high-level evaluation was performed to select the product with the ‘best fit’.

Before the high-level evaluation process was undertaken, a number of pre-requisite requirements were determined. These requirements included:

  • An integrated end-to-end enterprise management solution
  • Software currently compliant with ITIL
  • Seamless connectivity to other products, eg. MS - Active Directory
  • Mandatory functions Incident & Change Management. Desirable capability to include Configuration Management Database, Workflow, etc
  • A defined growth path (i.e. future upgrades are seamless without requiring radical changes);
  • Strong software documentation; and
  • Strong training programme to support the implementation of the software.

The Solution proposed

Precision approached the client with the solution to address the current need. A presentation was made to the top level executives and the IT Team. We had suggested the InsTILTM Enterprise for their IT support requirements.

The high-level evaluation identified InsTILTM an ITIL compliant product developed by Chennai based Precision Techconet, part of the 65 million USD Precision Group, as the software solution that is cost effective and had the ‘best fit’ with the requirements. InsTILTM provided a centralized and automated approach to incident, change, configuration management processes and had necessary proactive system management functions. InsTILTM also provided alerting and monitoring option, which was selected, and allowed uniform integration across all systems. Further, it allowed the IT management to head towards an end-to-end view of what was being provided to the organization’s internal and external customers.

The Solution offered:

ITIL was seen as a critical component in supporting the successful deployment and utilization of InsTILTM. A best practice process driven framework was required to support the day-to-day operations.

A project team was assembled with the credentials and proven track record of implementing InsTILTM and ITIL processes. Strong project governance was established from the outset to minimize risks associated with this type of project.

It was obvious from the initial demonstrations of InsTILTM capabilities (and the supporting processes) to the organization’s business units that there would be strong acceptance of the project.

A number of strategic decisions made at the outset and during the life of the project contributed to its success:

  • Initially, to re-engineer the existing processes, which were broadly aligned with ITIL to support the implementation of InsTILTM.
  • Little or no modification of the standard software to ensure seamless future upgrades of the product;
  • Transfer of skills from the project team (external to the organization) to the organization’s staff;
  • Expand the initial scope of the deployment of InsTILTM to include alert monitoring of critical mid-range and production servers; and

The key stakeholders and IT staff were engaged from the outset for the deployment of InsTILTM and supporting processes. This engagement included:

  • Documentation of the processes
  • Training
  • Deployment of software

The re-engineering of the existing IT Incident, Configuration and Change Management processes required an understanding of the ITIL framework. Therefore, a number of staff received ITIL training, to re-enforce the re-engineering of the existing processes to be aligned with ITIL. It is planned to continue with this formal training for the remaining IT staff, as they would support the continued deployment of ITIL across the IT infrastructure.

One of the organisation’s business units, which have a strong interface to the organisation’s customers, was an “early adopter” of InsTILTM solution, even though it was not a part of the original business Case scope. The deployment of InsTILTM has significantly changed the way the staff of this business unit handles and resolves problems. Implementation has been successful, due in part to the recognition that InsTILTM was an enabler for business change e.g. re-engineering the business processes, introducing business disciplines, etc. The deployment of InsTILTM and the implementation of ITIL have provided the IT department for the first time, full visibility of incidents, assets and changes and their relative impact. Further, the capability to monitor, track and report on incidents and problems has allowed a greater focus on service and availability management. In particular, with outsourcers to ensure that they meet their SLA obligations.

Benefits to client

The overall effect can be summarized as below:

New Capabilities Availability Impact
Created a single, uniform, integrated Workflow, Incident, configuration and Change Management process that is now standard, repeatable and consistent across the organization. Created a knowledge base by capturing problem information in a disciplined way. Enabled the introduction of ITIL best practice for IT service management. Increased Visibility – nature and status of problems across the organization eg. Problems and trends can be detected earlier, and can be more proactively managed. Increased Control - audit trail; not losing problem reports and workflow requests; improved response to alerts. Increased Reporting - currency, accuracy, reliable statistics. Improved decision making - increased ability to effectively and proactively manage problems. Decreased service outages, thus increasing customer service. Less reliance on individual expertise (i.e. corporate memory) to solve problems and manage workflow. Improved vendor management – increased visibility of problems, their priority and how service providers are performing against SLA’s. Taken on more tasks and roles (in-sourcing and consolidation) with minimal additional resources.

IT asset management a core feature of InsTILTM provided the benefits to record, track and report on IT assets. The benefits included:

  • Reconciliation of IT assets
  • Regular update of Assets to identify and control software usage
  • Proactive IT Asset monitoring, trend analysis and reporting
  • Complete and accurate record of IT assets covered by maintenance contracts
  • Hardware configuration information to facilitate on-going support for IT Assets

Continued support from executive management was critical to the success of the project. Executive management realized that the new system with support from the ITIL (processes) was necessary and fully supported the implementation of InsTILTM

The organization has begun to realize the benefits through the deployment of InsTILTM and ITIL for Incident, Change and Configuration Management. Its continued success is assured as business units are now asking for InsTILTM to be deployed with enhancements. The real benefit is a uniform approach to incident, change and configuration management. This allows the strategic objective to be achieved that of a corporate end-to-end view of operations.