Global Management Systems Infrastructure Delivery

Sector:
Blue Chip Financial Services Organisation

Business Challenge:
The organisation’s existing global Tivoli system management capabilities and infrastructure to support 50,000+ production systems had evolved over a period of 7 years without a clear strategy and alignment to business processes. The result was an infrastructure with 200+ systems management products providing overlapping functionality - the majority of which were difficult to support due to high levels of customisation to meet specific user requirements. They were also running on end of life hardware and software thus not only frustrating internal users but also clients due to unreliability and lack of resilience.

Although, it was recognised that a investment of approx £14m to re-implement a global systems management infrastructure was required, the development and project delivery functions of the group responsible for the infrastructure were not seen to be mature enough to manage the scale of the problem.

How did we help?
Xceed recognised the risk that the organisation was taking on a huge and extremely complex exercise. We also recognised that tools alone would do not solve business problems.

We used our experience on running large scale infrastructure and organisation change projects & programmes, benefits realisation and knowledge of IT Service Management to help build a benefits aligned business case for upgrading the infrastructure. We also helped to formulate a strategy for delivery that was based on a detailed phased approach and aligning tools to support ITIL processes. This ensured that the programme was established as an organisational change one, rather than a technology one.

Xceed also provided its strong knowledge of Datacentre Operations and software development to setup and manage an agile development lifecycle for the delivery of a “fit for production” infrastructure .

Not forgetting that building and rolling out the infrastructure was only half the challenge, Xceed helped to formulate a migration strategy and plan to enable systems to be migrated from the existing infrastructure to the new one.

Objectives:

• Produce Business Case
  
• Produce Benefits driven programme for delivery
• Manage development lifecycle
• Manage migration
• Align use of systems management tools to ITIL processes

Benefits Realisation:
Reduction in the time to market for new systems and software as a result of automated software delivery and provisioning tools.

Increase in the reliability of systems management tools with the removal of end of life and unsupported hardware and software as well as better design.

Improved operational efficiencies as a result of consolidating tools and aligning them to existing processes.

Improved customer satisfaction through the implementation of tools to enable proactive management of service rather than reactive.