The client’s IT service management environment supported diverse business streams and geographies, with a variety of processes and tools to match. IT leadership saw common processes and tooling as essential to enable organisational agility and to improve the quality of service delivery.

Existing Service Management tools included three separate instances of Remedy, one of Service-now and a large array of bespoke and in-house customised tools. Together with multiple service desks, portals, service levels and a range of operational maturities in IPM operations, the client saw an urgent need to rationalise onto a single platform for IPM.

The client was undertaking a major Data Centre transformation programme which included the implementation of new infrastructure solutions for enterprise storage and data protection services. The main goals being to deliver a cost effective, reliable, scalable and efficient backup & restore environment in accordance with the overall business objectives for the transformation programme.

The engagement was fulfilled through a strategic technology partner and covered the design, implementation and certification of a new backup & restore environment as well as the transition to an in-house operational support team.

4sl engaged on a firm-wide major process and technology transformation programme focused on delivering an enterprise service management (ESM) solution based on a single instance of the Service-Now ITSM platform. A key objective for the programme is to deliver a simplified, unified process model and enable the decommissioning of many tens of existing tools and systems.

Estate Management

To meet the demand of greater efficiency and effectiveness across IT services, 4sl offers a number of optimisation propositions to help accelerate benefits for their clients. Estate Management ensures that computing resources are deployed and supported in line with their operational needs, balancing the often conflicting demands of cost, performance and risk.

Client agenda

The Equities IT team at this tier 1 global Investment Bank had inherited a large Cash trading platform through M&A activity but with limited documentation and knowledge of the underling infrastructure estate. Management recognised the need for greater transparency over the assets in order to meet various audit criteria. However, focus on ‘post live’ production support left the Bank with limited resource and expertise to complete this work on time.

Engagement outcome & benefits

The primary objective was to confirm the assets making up the server estate, starting from an unreliable set of data. 4sl applied our proven asset discovery process, comprising:

• Gathering data from a combination of existing sources such as inventory/CMDB extracts
• Data reconciliation, validation, gap analysis and data augmentation, and
• Identifying, assigning & checking IT & business ownership.

The output, covering approximately 1,250 servers, was provided back to the Bank to update its inventory management system. In addition to satisfying the internal audit requirement, there were a number of additional benefits including:

• Enhanced MI including hardware/software asset IDs, operational and ‘end of life’ status
• Clear asset ownership (IT & business groups) for accurate cost allocation & chargeback
• 20% savings from 250 assets identified for recycling / redeployment / decommissioning
• Operational risk mitigation; approx. 21% of assets had reached End Of Life product status
• Greater transparency for future internal security & information assurance assessments.

A Satisfied Client

EMEA head of Equities Cash IT comments:

"4sl undertook a top-to-bottom review of our infrastructure estate. We selected them because of their track record of delivering excellent results in this field. Within the first week of their first assignment for our firm, they had uncovered over 10% of efficiency savings"

As a result of this work, the Bank has engaged 4sl to help deliver further benefits in a number of related estate management workstreams.

About 4sl Group

For further information on how 4sl can help you balance the demands of cost, performance and risk across IT visit www.4slgroup.com or contact Richard Simpkins on 0207 464 4071.

Client agenda

In 2007, the client and its takeover partner acquired a global competitor based in continental Europe. A year on, after significant delay and uncertainty brought on by the credit crisis, separation of the target bank’s financial markets business was well underway, but many shared IT systems and teams remained. To add to the complexity, some systems that were initially under the ownership and control of one partner were destined to be transferred to the other. The client wanted to ensure its costs were recharged appropriately to the partner during the transition phase.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

Our structured approach to this requirement was:

• To develop a cost recharge model from first principles, incorporating cost of ownership analysis of key shared IT platforms through the technology stack, including:
  • data centre operating costs, hardware depreciation & maintenance
  • software licensing & maintenance
  • internal and external support teams
  • development costs for statutory maintenance & enhancements
  • networks
  • market data
  • internally-developed software assets
  • management overheads
• To establish a forecast of IT service use through the application of both the partner’s IT build-out and migration plans, and the client’s integration plans, to each group of systems across the various product areas (including Fixed Income, FX & FX Options, Money Markets, Derivatives and Commercial Loans).
• To produce dynamic, consumption-based costings by measuring relative trade volumes and other appropriate metrics on a monthly basis.

The negotiation with the partner bank lasted several months, and involved representatives on the partner’s side from front and back office IT functions, and Finance. These were successfully completed in Q3 2009 and recharging commenced thereafter with 4sl liaising between the parties.

in Q3 2009 and recharging commenced thereafter with 4sl liaising between the parties.

Adding value to Bank’s internal financial management function

4sl Group was selected for this work due to our knowledge of the acquired bank’s systems, our commercial & business management expertise in financial markets IT and proven approach in delivering cost savings and cost reduction benefits.

Client agenda

Engaged by a large global service provider, 4sl provided IT Asset Management services to meet contractual responsibilities for the client organisation and also satisfy internal requirements across the whole supply chain.

With assets owned by the service provider in use across the client estate along with client owned assets, there were significant challenges across:

• accurate financial reporting both internally within the service provider for recharge capability to their client and within the client itself from a service perspective.
• the procurement and supply chain across the 100+ countries being serviced on over 25% of all orders.
• existing processes, tooling and organisational structure

4sl were asked to undertake an initial assessment and propose and deliver effective and efficient service improvement initiatives and to drive those enhancements into the service.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

Immediate Remediation of the Service

• Improvements driven into the Supply Chain processes and vendor relationships – escalations/queries on asset provision requests/orders from client reduced from > 25% to < 8% within 4 months resulting in a significant improvement in the view of the service from the client and reduction in “noise” to senior management from the client
• A review of the end-to-end processes required to fulfil the ITAM function was undertaken. Process gaps were identified across some areas of the function and suitable processes were created and tested to remediate this.
• Driving the ITAM function towards a successful Service Readiness Review and Service Introduction to ensure readiness capability to support the environment both during and following the global IT infrastructure and estate refresh/transformation

Tooling

• Fit for Service review of the proposed toolset for Asset Management was carried out and recommendation made to increase efficiency and capability where it was cost effective to do so. This is a shared service used across multiple client accounts causing significant challenges to the effective use within this particular account due to maintenance window conflicts, system functionality/capability and costly centralised support.
• Identification of significant issue around legacy asset recovery – Legacy assets with a net book value in excess of 10 MIO USD had been replaced with new hardware without being recovered from the end user.
• As ownership of these assets is with the Service Provider there was a financial implication along with the end user data integrity issue. 4sl implemented a one time solution along with BAU processes to recover these missing assets and agree the transfer of liability (data loss) and ownership back to the client where assets in non-recoverable.
• Creation and implementation into BAU of a complete MIS pack for the function to fulfil both internal requirements across Finance, Compliance, Audit and Services Management as well as client reporting requirements to ensure Licence Management Compliance capability, environmental waste policy adherence and client data management effectiveness.

Financial & Risk Outcomes

• Identification of significant gap in existing process which had led to a loss of over 100K USD worth of assets within the account so far. Closure of this gap to save an estimated 400K USD over the remaining lifetime of the account contract.
• Identification of user behaviour and process gaps causing assets to be irretrievable. 4sl arranged for the ownership and liability to passed back to the client removing data loss and legal risk from the Service Provider both on the existing estate and as a BAU process in future.

Adding Value to the Client’s Service Delivery function

4sl Group was selected for the engagement because of our experience and results from previous Asset & Licence Management projects. Furthermore, the client demanded a detailed understanding of the demands and challenges associated with relationships and contractual implications between Third Party Service Providers and their clients, particularly around the delta between contractual obligations to the client and the potentially conflicting internal requirements for a given Service Vertical, along with proven technical and project delivery expertise.

Client agenda

The client had experienced major challenges in the past with the performance and quality of their Backup/Restore service. They completed a successful assessment of the environment resulting in the transition to a new service provider two years ago. However, despite addressing some of the quality issues, the service became comparatively expensive and lacked robust reporting and change control functions – this ultimately resulted in a critical data loss incident. In response to this, the client looked for a more cost effective service but capable of meeting higher service levels (for backup & restore) with richer reporting and tighter change control.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

4sl’s Managed Backup Service offered a robust 24x7 service capability with mature auditable processes built on advanced service level reporting and a change management toolset.

High Levels of Backup & Restore Success: A proactive management approach – by leveraging automated procedures where appropriate, the 4sl operational team monitors the service 24x7 with engineers logging into the backup system. This approach has resulted in a success rate exceeding 99.7% backup success with restores tested on a regular basis. This high success rate ensures the client can have confidence that recoverable restore points exist and can be relied upon.

Standardisation and Advanced Reporting: 4sl has developed an industry leading reporting and monitoring toolset that is embedded within the backup service. Regular and adhoc reports are generated to provide detailed analysis of the health and performance of the environment whether for operational, or management purposes. However, they are presented in a very clear and concise way and enable any exceptions to be highlighted. The software provides the ability to define business service catalogues so that new servers can be auto-provisioned against the backup tier best suited to their requirements. This not only ensures the server is being backed-up correctly, but significant infrastructure costs savings can be made by adopting a service-class approach.

Robust Change Control: The 4sl service includes software that reports on any changes that have been made in the backup product during a pre-defined period. This is critical to ensure standards are kept and that policies are backing up the correct data, with the correct frequency and the correct retention settings. Any changes that are alerted are reviewed with the client and categorised as acceptable, tolerant or risk.

Adding value to firm’s service delivery function

4sl was selected for the engagement because of experience in enterprise-wide service support and delivery across a number of key infrastructure disciplines. The 4sl Managed Backup Service provides a consistently high level of service quality against clearly defined Service Levels combined with advanced reporting, robust change control and a cost effective price.

Client agenda

The client wanted to reduce TCO across the infrastructure estate within the Investment Bank. With zero capex budget available, the primary focus was to optimise existing assets to support medium-term business demand with strategic infrastructure services whilst removing legacy, unsupported and end-oflife hardware. Target solutions included use of standardisation, consolidation and virtualisation techniques. The client approached 4sl to analyse, design and deliver the range of optimisation solutions across the estate.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

Application Profiling: Initial focus was on gaining a thorough understanding of the estate, not only from a lifecycle perspective, but through the utilisation profile of the application processes themselves.

Optimisation Policies: with detailed application profiles, a “recycle-reuse-refresh” policy was defined for the infrastructure sets supporting each application. Assets were analysed for application consolidation across the estate and a shared-resource strategy promoted. The mandate from senior management ensured any barriers were removed and a proactive approach put in place. Implementation and robust management of optimisation policies delivered a hardware reduction and increased asset utilisation.

Infrastructure Savings: Significant cost savings have resulted from reduction in infrastructure footprint, with most streams seeing a 30% fall in costs year-on-year.

Adding value to Bank’s service delivery function

4sl Group was selected for the engagement because of our results from previous infrastructure optimisation projects and the adoption of a formal Service Lifecycle approach. Furthermore, the client demanded a detailed understanding of the demands and challenges associated with enterprise adoption of virtual infrastructure technologies along with proven technical and project delivery expertise.

Client agenda

The client had reached a critical point with their London based Datacentres with the facilities quickly becoming a constraint to Business growth as well as causing stability and capacity problems. They approached 4sl Group for help advise on best practices and procedures for the infrastructure migration and for day-to-day programme management of the initiative.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

The engagement resulted in a number of outcomes that have benefited the Bank:

• A legacy Datacentre that was near or at the limits of its critical performance factors has been emptied and returned to the landlord, saving the Bank leasing costs for a facility that was no longer fit for purpose.
• Critical and non-Critical applications have been moved onto new, modern & Technical Roadmap Compliant equipment. As a result capacity issues have been eliminated and application performance has increased dramatically which in turn this has increased customer satisfaction.
• The new Datacentre facilities are state of the art, allowing the Bank to deploy Technical Infrastructure in a manner that was not possible before. Areas with improved cooling solutions allow the deployment of high density computing over much reduced footprint.
• Infrastructure Deployment processes and procedures have been tested with high volumes of requirements and adjustments were made where weaknesses were observed. The end to end provisioning mechanism is now much smoother and has significantly reduced SLAs.
• During this Programme of activity planned and unplanned downtime did not exceed the Bank average. Stringent Migration Governance and Change Management ensured moves would only take place in a planned and controlled manner which ensured smooth transition.

Adding value to Bank’s service delivery function

4sl Group was selected for the engagement due to their experience in managing such large pieces of work and delivering to customer expectations whilst promoting best practices and approaches.

Client agenda

The client has a very large enterprise-wide backup & restore infrastructure and had invested in a number of point solutions to generate operational and management reports from the environment. However, the reporting service itself failed to meet the functional requirements of all stakeholders and users. The bank approached 4sl Group to help articulate a formal set of requirements to satisfy operational, management, business & financial reporting needs and establish a target architecture for a more effective and efficiency reporting solution.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

The engagement resulted in a number of deliverables to help establish the future state reporting needs for the backup environment including:

• A formal prioritised set of requirements representing the needs of operational, management, business and financial functions.
• A range of tactical and strategic recommendations to help consolidate and standardise the reporting environment to meet those requirements.
• Initiation of a vendor relationship management initiative to help raise awareness of the incumbent solution, the roadmap for future functionality and education & training for greater operational efficiency.

Adding value to Bank’s service delivery function

4sl was selected for the engagement because of their independence from any vendor solution in the Backup technology space, their experience of working with stakeholders across operational, business and financial management teams and their flexible engagement approach. The benefits seen by the client included greater visibility of the backup reporting environment, an installed product set that could be leveraged to a much higher extent leading to an increase in operational efficiency.

Client agenda

The client had engineered a Virtual Infrastructure through a global programme for cross group enterprise implementation, and was looking to complete a successful ‘transition to operation’ phase for the service offerings. They approached 4sl Group to deliver a flexible and responsive engagement model to assist with the 12-week handover phase of the programme.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

The engagement resulted in a number of deliverables that have helped to realise benefits in the service delivery & support functions for the Virtual Infrastructure including:

• 4sl’s Landscape Profiling process executed with 10 key stakeholders to identify tactical and pragmatic service improvement initiatives to mitigate risk, improve operational efficiency and time to market.
• A number of strategic recommendations have been promoted to optimise the supply chain, mature the billing model, improve management reporting and establish a self-service portal. Further ‘operational engineering’ activity is being planned to deliver on these objectives.
• Establishment of a Service Management Framework to ensure best practices and procedures are adopted for a robust, stable and sustainable Virtual Infrastructure service.
• Knowledge transfer from the programme team to the operational functions to help mitigate risk and ensure operational efficiency.

Adding value to Bank’s service delivery function

4sl Group was selected for the engagement by promoting the Service Lifecycle Management method and the disciplines and behaviours required to accelerate service maturity and realise benefits. Furthermore, the client demanded a detailed understanding of the demands and challenges associated with running an enterprise Virtual Infrastructure and significant technical and project delivery expertise.

Client agenda

A variety of business management challenges ranging from the basic production and availability of financial reports through to high volatility in monthly costs resulting in significant uncertainty around forecasting and budgeting right up to CIO level. Furthermore, the client was recently acquired by a consortium of banks and faced a complex integration process due to the need to split some IT applications and services between the consortium partners as well as fundamental changes in the operating model.

Engagement outcomes & deliverables

The engagement has delivered a number of improvements across financial control and reporting:

• monthly accruals process for project costs where none had previously been in place, closing an audit point.
• simplification of cost centre structure, closure of defunct codes and re-alignment of costs across functions.
• initiated monthly balance sheet reporting with periodic asset review
• implemented an online financial issues reporting and tracking tool, ensuring that issues were investigated and resolved, and root causes analysed to determine further process improvements.
• delivered a number of ‘roadshows’ for the project management community to raise financial awareness, explain reports, the processes behind them and improve financial acumen.
• uncovered anomalies relating to approx £25m of operational costs being misreported as project costs
• collaborated with another supplier in the Business Management domain to establish a consolidated global financial view at any level of aggregation from project right through to CIO, enabling proper variance analysis which in turn reduced month-on-month volatility
• migration of the Finance function for the global vendors from New York to Amsterdam ensuring service continuity for reporting £60m p.a. of project spend. This included a lengthy post go-live ‘handholding’ and education process for the new Finance team.
• delivered a ‘Cost of Ownership’ assessment for applications being kept or decommissioned in the integration process, which has been established as the benchmark for measurement against savings targets

Adding value to Bank’s decision-making process

4sl Group were selected for the engagement because of our client side experience in business and financial management. A high level of trust has been established which has been evident on a number of occasions as 4sl has been able to produce key pieces of management information required in the Bank’s decision making process. The engagement is currently focussed on establishing relationships with regional finance and IT contacts to transition from the pre-integration to the new ‘postacquisition’ operating model.

Client agenda

The client has undertaken a business led initiative to define a Future State Architecture for the firm. In response to this, the Technology Infrastructure Services group within the IT division are looking to establish a portfolio of technology roadmaps to ensure alignment with the requirements resulting from the business strategy.

The roadmaps will provide a view of strategic products and solutions for the next 2-3 years and will present how the corresponding infrastructure services will be architected, engineered, implemented and maintained over that period.

The engagement includes:

• Development of 3 year roadmaps for platforms, virtual infrastructure, databases and storage technologies.
• Overall governance model and service lifecycle management for the infrastructure services.
• Situational assessment, gap analysis & service improvement planning.
• Programme definition & work breakdown structure.

Adding value to the client team

4sl Group has been selected to assist with this strategic initiative based on a proven track record of high value delivery, significant subject matter expertise and detailed knowledge of the operating environment. The need to demonstrate benefits through early identification of operational efficiency, risk mitigation and cost avoidance opportunities is a key requirement for the firm and one that 4sl has been chosen for its ability to satisfy.