Strategic transformation can take many forms and address myriad business challenges. In his third installment of his “How to Run and Transform” blog series, Achmad Chadran examines the consistent need to maintain IT operations apace while actively redefining their essential processes, and the value that a uniquely qualified solution partner can bring to bear.
Business leaders can pursue strategic transformation for many different reasons.
Fundamentally, strategic transformation programs address the gaps between an organization’s current standing and a desired future state. These gaps can involve:
- Achieving Growth Targets
- Increasing Efficiency
- Improving Product Quality
- Responding to Market Shifts
As a business operations leader, you thus need to manage any strategic transformation program in terms of the ability to effect positive change, on the one hand, and to keep the lights on, on the other. In other words, to run and transform at the same time.
Fortunately, this is an area where Micro Focus can bring unique capabilities to your organization as a solution partner. The following are a few of the many real-world examples of organizations who’ve succeeded in their strategic transformation programs with the help of Micro Focus.
How to Transform Service Management Using ITIL Best Practices
As the largest international airport in Switzerland and the principal hub of Swiss International Air Lines, Zurich Airport works with a variety of partners, from luggage handlers, to car hire services, duty free shops, and airport accommodation providers. Its aim is to provide a consistent service to its internal and external customers, and transparency in its governance, processes, rules, and infrastructure is key to this objective.
As Christoph Düggeli, Team Leader IT Service Management for Zurich Airport, explained, “We want to understand exactly what systems and interfaces we have, how these interact with our processes, what data is available and, more importantly, what data do we need to fulfill an IT order such as a workplace for a new employee.”
The team felt that structured IT service management is at the source of this and although there was an IT support ticketing system, this fell short in many areas. It had very limited integration capabilities and as a result the information available was of poor quality and did not reflect a real-time scenario. Because the information was mainly entered manually, the system contained redundant and duplicate data.
To create a consistent IT service management structure, Zurich Airport needed a new solution.
Zurich Airport was clear on its requirements: the solution needed to be fully ITIL-compliant and contain broad integration capabilities to share data between key systems to ensure the IT service management solution would be efficient and provide the insights for continuous improvement.
After a full evaluation of the leading market options, the team selected Micro Focus SMAX. A project team with representatives from Zurich Airport, Micro Focus, and technical teams in charge of the configuration management system (CMS) and enterprise service bus (ESB), which were the first integration priorities, came together to scope the main SMAX configuration, covering incident, problem, and change management processes.
By integrating SMAX with monitoring and alarm systems, the team can automate event ticketing flows, from fault detection to recovery, reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). With SMAX out-of-the-box integration capabilities, for example REST APIs, and guided by Micro Focus Professional Services, Zurich Airport was able to integrate their infrastructure monitoring with SMAX to automatically update, resolve, and close tickets raised by system alerts, without any manual intervention.
With all IT services available through SMAX, over 1,700 users can now access a single portal for their IT service requests. More than 2,500 tickets are processed each month by 130 ICT employees. With its SMAX implementation, Zurich Airport has embraced ITIL-certified best practices to streamline IT and non-IT processes, achieves faster resolution time due to the solution’s full integration capabilities, and now enjoys high user adoption and satisfaction with the solution’s self-service options and intelligent search capabilities.
Concluded Düggeli, “SMAX provided the integration capabilities we needed, and supports our ITIL-driven processes for full governance. We can also see the potential for operational cost savings.”
You can read the full Zurich Airport customer case study here.
How to Transform by Boosting Agent Productivity
Envirosuite is a global leader in environmental intelligence and a trusted partner to the world’s leading aviation, mining, industrial, waste, and water companies. Envirosuite solutions turn environmental monitoring and data into real-time intelligence—helping customers optimize their operations, manage their environmental impact, and remain compliant with regulations.
Patrick Quin, manager of operational excellence at Envirosuite, noted “Our software and sensors are deployed across some of the world’s most critical infrastructure. We’re focused on delivering exceptional customer service where uptime and reliability are crucial.”
Unfortunately, a 20-year-old ticketing system began to adversely impact operations.
“To live up to our high customer standards and focus on our core business,” Quin continued, “we knew we had to move to a new ITSM solution.”
At Envirosuite, the ticketing tool sits at the heart of business processes across the organization and is used by developers, field service staff, sales, and finance. Easy user access from around the world, mobile-friendly self-service options, and support for a great deal of automation and integration topped the list of requirements.
But the number-one requirement was a SaaS-based ITSM solution. As Quin put it, “Not having to worry about upgrades and having an expert organization be responsible for ongoing maintenance was key.”
Following an extensive multivendor evaluation process, Envirosuite chose Micro Focus SMAX on SaaS. Envirosuite worked with EoraTech, a local Micro Focus gold partner with extensive experience in ITSM, ITOM, and cloud, to smooth the path from a legacy platform to SMAX. EoraTech helped to configure SMAX and build critical integrations with Salesforce, Atlassian Jira, Envirosuite’s email system, and five different monitoring systems. EoraTech also provided the necessary training for a successful rollout.
In just four months — indeed, during a very busy holiday season — the company went live with SMAX.
By all accounts, SMAX is a smashing success. Incident and change management are two important processes that are now automated by SMAX. Envirosuite has also made remarkable improvements in change management, already a well-developed process at the company.
“Using SMAX for change management has been simply transformative,” declared Quin. “Our teams have moved from using four different tools to having everything centralized in SMAX.”
You can read the full Envirosuite customer case study here.
How to Transform Through Simplification
Achmea is the largest insurance company in The Netherlands, serving 10.2 million customers through such insurance brands as Centraal Beheer, Interpolic, and Zilveren Kruis. Comprised of a number of different merged and acquired insurance companies, Achmea had a varied IT landscape with many core applications as well as legacy systems.
As Onno van der Dussen, IT Operations Manager for ITSM Tooling, explained, “To improve our time to value, it was clear we needed to consolidate and reduce the number of applications we support, as well as automate process and workflows.”
Over the past decade, Achmea formulated an IT governance model based on defined digital IT value streams, standardization, and automation. The company plans to move its key applications to an Azure environment as part of a cloud-first strategy.
“However,” continued van der Dussen, “right now we operate a hybrid infrastructure,and so it is important to us that our solutions support that too. Micro Focus SMAX fits the bill for us.”
As a result of its new deployment, the team relies on SMAX for end-to-end service management, supporting 14,000 Achmea colleagues in The Netherlands. The SMAX implementation follows the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles to create business value at scale and simplify the work, cost, and use of service management with a complete set of out-of-the-box ITIL best practices for key ITSM functions.
With pervasive automation and SMAX’s codeless configuration, Achmea is able now to easily respond to required changes for their processes, workflows, and tasks. Micro Focus Data Center Automation (DCA) integrates with SMAX to identify and govern compliance for Windows servers on Azure, helping prevent compliancy breaches.
As Sander de Leeuw, Application Manager for SMAX at Achmea, observed, “With DCA, we have total flexibility in how we manage compliance and can use DCA’s security and regulatory benchmarks and controls, or our own custom controls, that require enforcement.”
You can read the full Achmea customer case study here.
Many Reasons to Transform, One Imperative
As these cases illustrate, strategic transformation can come in a variety of flavors. An organization may launch a transformation initiative to reduce costs, increase productivity, improve product quality, or all of these at once. Likewise, transformation can be extensive, affecting an entire company or agency. Transformation can also focus on an individual department or a specific process.
Regardless of its shape or scope, however, strategic transformation programs need to factor in the need to maintain operations apace. Micro Focus is committed to – and uniquely capable of – helping IT leaders like you run and transform your business at the same time.
What’s your vision for strategic transformation?
