After interviewing a CIO about his recent work Ithought that his challenges and solutions would be of interest to readers ofour blog. Dave is an exceptional CIO with at knack for getting thejob done by taking a strategic approach that focuses on how IT can help thebusiness deliver superior service to its' customers.
TRANSFORMING IT in the REALWORLD
By: Dave Brattain
Continuity of customer service is important in any industry, but for afinancial services company such as Elavon, continuity is fundamental forbusiness growth.
Our customers will not tolerate having to wait for a financial transaction tobe processed: they want fast, faultless service. Such high expectationsplace considerable pressure on our IT systems. To ensure a seamless customerexperience, our IT infrastructure has to be reliable, scalable and alwaysavailable.
To deliver on all these fronts, we needed to develop a robust and integratedapproach to IT Management that could also facilitate business change,regulatory compliance and cost control. As the third largest merchantacquirer in North America, Elavon serves restaurants, retailers, hotels,mail-order businesses and government agencies in 30 countries. Every day,we process millions of transactions on behalf of our merchant customers-fromcheck and credit card payments to prepaid gift cards. We also providepayment terminals, PIN pads, printers and proprietary software to be used atindividual merchant locations.
Any interruption in customer service impacts not only our business, but alsothat of our 1 million merchant locations around the world. Like mostorganizations involved in transaction processing, IT is at the heart of ourday-to-day operations and is critical to our ongoing success. Our ITservices and systems are tightly coupled with our business goals and theexpectations of our customers.
Although service-level expectations vary from merchant to merchant, they allshare one requirement: no unplanned downtime. If we suffer aninterruption in service and can't process a transaction, it will have a directnegative effect on a merchant and its customers. Given the role of our ITsystems in such a critical revenue generating and customer-facing process,resilience, compliance and availability are essential. We must be able torespond immediately to prevent an IT issue from becoming a criticalproblem. To provide this proactive response, our Systems & Technology(S&T) organization needs 24/7 visibility into the company's infrastructure,as well as solid processes for change, release, problem and asset management.
We need as much integration as possible in order to achieve a solid ROI. CA Service Desk is the focal point for a large portion of this integration andhas become the linchpin for our S&T organization. Instead of relyingon one of our 300 staff members to report a fault, many issues are now loggedautomatically to our help desk. As a dynamic and virtual systemsmanagement solution, CA NSM monitors our core infrastructure around theclock. Many of the servers are operating as multiple virtual machines,but they can be monitored as if they were physical devices. We can managethe performance of the physical servers and monitor the resource utilization ofeach of the virtual machines, so we can make changes in a fairly effortlessway, ensuring that the virtual environment is aligned to our business needs.
By adopting a virtualized approach, we've been able to consolidate hundreds ofphysical servers into a handful of devices. But consolidation is just thefirst phase of virtualization. We intend to proactively use our virtualmachines to respond to peaks in demand by enabling automatedprovisioning. As our virtualization strategy matures, we hope to use CAData Center Automation Manager to automate the provisioning of new virtualmachines based on predetermined criteria. Tracking an IT problem back toone of these virtual devices-or any other IT component-has beensimplified. NSM enables event correlation, a key requirement inestablishing the root cause of an IT problem.
Prior to deploying this solution, we had to send legions of people into thefield to determine if an issue was network-, server-, desktop- orapplication-related. Now, we can quickly establish the cause of a problemand often fix it before it affects a user. Faults with IT devices are notthe only problems being logged automatically. The integration of ServiceDesk with CA autosys means that if a scheduled job fails to run, a ticket willbe raised with our help desk. We use autosys to automate hundreds of ITjobs every day, and we know immediately if a job fails: the system sends ageneral automated alert and notifies the appropriate team.
CA Software Change Manager plays a role in the release of new source code forour production systems and for the solutions we provide to our clients. We must be able to effectively process changes to these applications to keep upwith customer demand, regulatory requirements and new technologies. Beyond ensuring that source code changes are implemented correctly, we need toprovide an audit trail for all changes to our production systems, whether it involveshardware or software. This audit trail is critical for demonstrating aseparation of duties, which is a requirement of the PCI standards. Withour new solutions, we can demonstrate that separate individuals are carryingout key tasks in the change management process.
All of this has allowed us to meet another industry standard: the eliminationof cron jobs-a specific requirement of Visa and PCI compliance. By usingautosys, we have been able to replace those jobs with automated scripts. Our compliance efforts have been further enhanced by our new ITIL-basedapproach to incident management. Every year, we have to provide ourauditors with a document that outlines our tactical support model and proves weare following our own processes. By implementing ITIL and EITM solutions,we've been able to provide this information in significantly less time.
Our S&T organization has also been able to reduce the time involved inmanaging the company's 5,000-plus IT assets. Using the CA Asset Intelligenceand CA Client Management Solution, we can now track assets throughout theirlife cycle.
Our improved resolution times are now being tracked as part of ourservice-level management initiative, which is supported by the built-inmeasurement and reporting capabilities of the new solutions. This allowsS&T to demonstrate its ability to continuously improve business servicelevels and communicate achievements in terms easily understood by thebusiness. This closer alignment of IT to the business will be extended byour plans to adopt a shared services model, which will be facilitated by CAClarity PPM. This will enable the S&T organization to make better use ofits' IT resources around the globe. Our aim for global visibility appliesto every part of our IT operation. We already have 24/7 visibilitybetween our operations in the United States and Western Europe, and we will beadopting this model across the globe.
Measuring ROI:
Since embarking on our IT transformation in 2006, we've been able to makeconsiderable efficiency gains. The automation and integration enabled by theEITM solutions allows us to operate more effectively and provide a quickresponse to IT problems. This has a direct impact on the productivity ofour staff, as they now benefit from:
- Increased uptime: Applications and systems are more available, and users nolonger have to spend time
reporting faults to the help desk.
- Self-service support: By providing employees with access to Service Desk viaa Web interface, users can
resolve minor IT issues without having to go through the full incidentmanagement life cycle.
In addition, virtualization will help us free up rack and floor space in ourdata centers; reduce energy consumption, especially in terms of cooling requirements;and take advantage of unused processing power.
Our virtualization strategy is also key to supporting future growth. Asthe capacity demands of our merchants grow, we have to be able to respondquickly with additional processing resources. With a virtualinfrastructure, we can deploy a "new" server much more quickly.
Acquisitions are another key component of our growth strategy. Since wecan use the Asset Management tools to get immediate visibility of the newdevices we have inherited, the integration of new companies into ourinfrastructure has been simplified.
These solutions also help us capture the configuration and software portfolioof each device, which ensures that the right licensing agreements are in placepost-acquisition. The new solutions also have helped us improve costcontrol, simplify regulatory compliance and audits, safeguard the speed andsecurity of 1 billion customer payments, and ensure consistent service levels.
Our ability to maintain the availability of our systems and to processtransactions seamlessly gives us a competitive advantage and will help us growour business and customer base.
If you have any questions or comments aboutDave's article we'd love to hear them, and if you have written any articles,blogs or whitepapers that you think would interest and educate other IT execsand managers like yourself please forward them token@berkshirerecruiting.com ... you could become famous.
