THE COMPANY
This locally owned, privately held community financial institution offers personal and business banking, loans, insurance, and consulting services through more than a dozen full-service branches. The company has hundreds of millions in assets under management and thousands of ATM locations.
What the company lacked, as it discovered because of an audit, is a full set of documented and repeatable processes for managing its IT environment..
THE NEED: Close the ‘gaps’ in their IT service delivery processes.
It’s not uncommon for companies to develop an organic approach to IT management that’s short on formal process and long on simply getting today’s work done. For most, such an approach causes problems only when the IT organization fails to deliver to the business the required IT systems management as expected.
In some industries, like the finance industry, regulatory agencies can spark a change.
As was the case with this Midwest financial institution when an audit by a federal agency found, among other things, that its IT governance had significant gaps. One gap was the lack of well-defined documentation around many of their service management practices.
The company reached out to its technology partner, LRS IT Solutions, for help.
As Mike Gallagher, Practice Leader in LRS IT Solutions, recalled, the financial institution said they were concerned their current tool couldn’t provide the required capabilities needed to address the audit findings. Also, they realized that they needed to close the gaps within their processes to address the audit findings.
“Just to understand the scope of their situation, our team and the bank’s resources needed to ‘school’ each other,” Mike explained. “We needed them to translate the audit findings to help us better understand them. While we needed to explain best practices for IT service management so they could then address their specific process gaps.”
‘Teasing’ requirements out of the staff was accomplished by our resources collaborating with the bank’s staff and getting their answers to some fundamental questions. The group then wrote a Statement of Work detailing the tasks and process they would follow to uncover the client’s requirements and align them with the IT Service Management (ITSM) tools they were evaluating.
THE SOLUTION: Freshdesk software from Freshservice.
“To uncover the gaps, we had them walk us through each of the service delivery steps in the areas the audit deemed them to be deficient.” Mike recalled. “For example, we asked, ‘if somebody wants to buy and deploy a new laptop, how do they do it?’ Often the bank staff had to go to their management to confirm how they planned to handle such things and gain their concurrence.”
“Now a user can submit a request to the ticketing tool and say I need to deploy a new server, and the tool goes to the image library catalog and grabs the standard image, and that’s what’s deployed.” — Mike Gallagher LRS Infrastructure & Cloud Solution Manager
Armed with information from interviewing financial institution staff, the LRS team wrote up the use cases, including onboarding and offboarding of employees, IT asset tagging, tracking and management, and the different approval processes needed to for procuring certain classes of assets or deploying server images for example.
It became obvious that, in addition to a new software tool, the company needed help defining their approval processes for activities such as procurement. The right tool would be able to automate and support their processes.
The LRS team linked their requirements to two different software tools they were considering. Ultimately, they selected Freshdesk software from Freshservice.
Freshdesk now provides the process automation the financial institution was lacking, around asset procurement. As Mike noted, LRS worked with the client so the software tool was deployed in a manner that addressed the gaps identified by the audit.
THE RESULT: Automated asset management and solid processes
Although the Freshdesk software is not fully implemented, it’s clear to the financial institution that it will deliver value in areas like:
- Automation of routine workflows
- Request and Approval routing
- Service ticket analytics
This will improve the banks IT team’s ability to provide services like deployments, patching and requests for help consistently and efficiently to the other user departments.
“Now they have this “golden image” kind of catalog of laptop images and server images that all meet the security requirements as mandated by the CISO,” Mike said. “Users can submit a request via the ticketing tool requesting the deployment of a new server, and the tool will automatically route the request through the required approval process and then go to the image library catalog, grab the standard image, deploy it and then notify the requestor that it’s ready for them to use.”
Additionally, the LRS team created a complete set of processes for the banks IT group for managing each asset throughout its entire lifecycle. Maintaining such practices is the basis of ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library which will help the client with subsequent government audits.
Along with addressing all the issues highlighted in the audit, the work done by LRS elevated the stature of the client’s CIO and the IT department. Departments such as Procurement, HR, and the CFO now see the CIO and his team as adding value to their respective areas.
SOLUTIONS
- Researched company’s processes for managing assets
- Obtained and installed Freshdesk software from freshservice
- Configured automated processes in Freshdesk to manage assets from procurement through lifecycle and then notify the requestor that it’s ready for them to use.” Additionally, the LRS team created a complete set of processes for the banks IT group for managing each asset throughout its entire lifecycle.
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