SITUATION
A major eCommerce company experienced a series of system outages due to high traffic overwhelming servers that caused its website to go down. Customers were not able to complete transactions, which affected brand trust and reduced confidence in IT.
CHALLENGE
The business needed to address and solve these issues from both the business side and the IT side. The main concern was to make sure IT had everything they needed to prevent another incident. The company went in search of expertise to address this issue through an IT service quality program and found that expertise in AIM Consulting.
SOLUTION
IT leadership had read the book “The Opposite of Luck,” coauthored by AIM Solution Director Mike Hagan, which speaks directly to the issues the company was encountering around IT quality management. The company contacted Mike Hagan to provide subject-matter expertise and contracted AIM Consulting to implement the IT Quality solution.
The first task was to evaluate existing service quality efforts. From the evaluation, several initiatives were identified and prioritized, including the need for an IT Services scorecard and an assessment of the IT Service Management capabilities. The scorecard would allow IT management to view quality in four main areas: downtime, response time, error rate, and scalability. AIM Consulting combined IT Service Management expertise with Business Intelligence and Tableau development resources to build the scorecarding tool and establish a roadmap to improve the visibility and IT service quality into those four areas. During the initial assessment, several roadblocks—including the challenge of collecting the proper data to create the scorecard with the right KPIs across the management community—were discovered and addressed.
In addition, AIM consulting performed an assessment of the organization’s IT Service Management capabilities, which encompassed a review of the company’s service operations, including incident, problem, change, and request fulfillment. Recommendations were also made regarding how IT can improve processes with existing technology that’s no longer supported.
RESULTS
With the new scorecard system in place, the company’s IT leaders have increased visibility into problems that exist across the services they manage and support. They hold weekly meetings and are now able to monitor progress against key performance indicators they’ve defined for each service team.
Overall, AIM helped the company recognize several initiatives that needed to be undertaken to mature its capabilities and improve visibility in the quality of the services it manages. The company has benefited greatly from being able to reduce the amount of overhead spent on sustaining operations and from monitoring operations proactively.
