Transition of IT service of bank from the platform of NR Service Desk to HP Service Manager

Alfa-Bank is one of the oldest adherents of ideology of ITSM in Russia. The process approach to the organization of IT service practices in bank about ten years, and system implementation of automation of customer support department and basic processes of ITSM — the HP solution of Service Desk 4.5 — took place in 2003.^[1]

As Victor Alferov, the director of Directorate of maintenance of information systems of Alfa-Bank told, by 2010 in a system all staff of IT service, including its regional divisions — in total about one thousand people worked. On the HP platform, in addition to user support, incident management processes and changes were implemented, agreements on the service level of business users were signed and controlled. Weekly in a system about 10 thousand addresses were processed. The HP platform was integrated with a large number of external information systems of bank, including a personnel system, a management system for identification, the systems of telephony, e-mail, sending the SMS, etc.

Having approached by 2010 with solid experience of automation of ITSM on the HP platform, the IT service of bank nevertheless appeared before a problem of the choice of the new platform. In addition to restrictions of the used version of HP of Service Desk which did not give the chance to expand number of users and did not support more modern operational Microsoft platforms the policy of producer became the main reason for refusal of it. HP made the decision to stop Service Desk development, having replaced it with a new solution, Service Manager. In Alfa-Bank, however, the decision on migration on HP Service Manager was not made automatically — the choice of the new platform was preceded by the careful analysis of the modern market of solutions of automation of ITSM. Preserving of investments and functionality of a system became key arguments for benefit of HP Service Manager.

The project of migration on a new product took about a year, but transition from one system to another was carried out within four hours early in the morning on March 6, 2011. The IT service of bank made the basic decision not to resort to a transitional stage — simultaneous existence of two systems, old and new. Now HP Service Manager is at a stage of trial operation.

Considering complexity of migration in the conditions of scales of bank and its IT service, in the project it was not carried out any works on reengineering of management of services - it is a problem of the next stage of work with HP Service Manager. But emergence of a new system allowed IT service of bank to implement fully process of management of problems which to support using the outdate Service Desk there was no sense. According to Alferov, problem management will allow to control efficiency and quality of IT maintenance of business of bank, to quickly reveal and liquidate the root reasons of incidents and failures in service of IT systems, critical for business. The bank calculates that in a year after implementation of process of management of problems the number of incidents and accidents will be reduced by 10% that means decrease in time of idle times of IT systems by 18 thousand hours in a month.

Alferov emphasized that transition to Service Manager offered big prospects IT service of bank. There will be at last an opportunity to implement a full-scale knowledge management process which is also directed to reduction of number of incidents and acceleration of permission of standard problems. On the basis of the centralized base of configuration units HP Universal CMDB the uniform resource and service model of IT service will be constructed. The next plans are creation on the new platform of a uniform self-service portal of users instead of two separate portals existing earlier for processing of addresses on incidents and for service requests.

However at all functional power of a new product it was not succeeded to apply it "from a box" — the considerable Service Manager setup for support of processes of IT service of "Alfa-Bank" was required. As Boganov Andrey, the director of the department of ITSM solutions of Inline Group company noticed, the number of the required completions made system implementation actually the project on development. Works were conducted by forces of the joint command which integrated the staff of IT service of bank, specialists of Inline Group who was engaged in "tuning" of a system, and the technical adviser of HP company who at the last stage of the project booked audit and optimization of system performance.

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