Situation

A leading financial services institution with more than 6 million consumer and small business customers across 19 states was experiencing major outages while decommissioning their servers. With more than 2,700 branches, online, mobile services and 8,600 ATM machines, this compromised data, putting customers at risk. Consequently, regulatory and audit pressures were mounting, and the technology organization was under tremendous scrutiny.

Solution

BusinessForward was engaged to provide IT process and documentation with an organizational structure for retiring and replacing (decommissioning) servers without any user disruption or data loss. We uncovered a lack of standardized and documented processes and procedures, no centralized tool for tracking the lifecycle of a server decommission, an unstructured organization, and a culture that didn’t view this as a unified service. In fact, an initial audit performed on a sample of conducted decommissions uncovered a failure to adhere to any standard process 65% of the time.

To help the customer address these issues BusinessForward:

• Identified a dedicated decommissioning team and process to ensure consistency and sustainability
• Developed and implemented a “factory-like” workflow with the ability to handle a high volume of requests
• Outlined a structured organization of clearly defined roles and responsibilities
• Identified a technology tool to measure adherence to the new process and its effectiveness in reducing outages

Results

The documented improvements established by BusinessForward facilitate adherence to an end-to-end server decommissioning process. Post-implementation, failure rate for adherence decreased from 65% to 35%. In the first full year, not a single outage occurred during the decommissioning of more than 3,000 servers. Productivity to retire servers tripled.

Today, a unified decommission process based on the bank’s decommissioning criteria is in place. The IT organization is confident that their new way of doing things is consistent with the needs of the business and meets enterprise-wide and government guidelines.