Leading Regional Bank and GuideIT’s Strategic IT Partnership

GuideIT serves as a strategic partner to the regional bank’s overall IT organization and enables better results through increased responsiveness, end-user satisfaction, and improved cost efficiency ratios. Services consist of End User Management, End-to-End Infrastructure Management and Enterprise Security Services.

The Customer

The regional bank is a large commercially oriented, community bank that serves local entrepreneurs, businesses and families. With more than $8B in assets spanning 40 locations, they are one of the largest locally based banks in their area. In addition to commercial, business, and consumer banking, they also offer a full range of mortgage services through their Mortgage Division.

The Challenge

The Information Technology organization was seeking alternatives to enable more innovation while continuing to provide great support of its existing business. The bank was embarking upon key strategic initiatives such as greater growth through M&A and rapid deployment of Digital Banking solutions to transform the business. Support of these initiatives and scaling to meet the needs of deploying and operating those new tools while delivering the day to day demands was challenging.

Secondarily, there were IT support challenges to deploy industry standards and IT best practices throughout the enterprise, and the bank wanted greater responsiveness from the IT organization. The areas of focus included operationalizing a best in class delivery model to achieve improved quality and cost efficiency ratios. Therefore, the organization would also have objectives to address the following:

• Create an exceptional end-user experience that is responsive and affordable to the business
• Consistent quality delivery of IT that links technology results with business objectives
• Management of change that would not disrupt key objectives in support of the strategic growth initiatives

GuideIT Financial Services Solutions contribute to institutions thriving in a competitive landscape by establishing a cost-effective, strategy-enabling IT function; enabling technological innovation; and converting data into actionable intelligence that enables increased operational efficiency, fraud detection, and risk mitigation. GuideIT also provides solutions in the areas of compliance management, M&A, and cyber security.

The Solution

As part of a strategic decision to define a new support model that allowed the bank to focus on these challenges, GuideIT was engaged as an experienced provider of IT services to implement solutions that would bridge operations across their enterprise infrastructure environment and enable business growth. The solutions in the partnership included Engineering, End User Support, Security focused on End Point Protection. The agreement outlined deployment and operationalizing an ITIL-based best practices framework to establish standards of a service delivery model to ensure the achievement of targeted operational improvement, end user satisfaction and cost savings. Key indicators of measurement for the ongoing management and operations included:

• Identification and management of end user request and service level-based outcomes that measured results
• Measurement of responsiveness of the IT support function to the business
• Prioritization and development of IT roadmaps that supported key business drivers with greater results
• Implementation of a vendor optimization program that resulted in greater cost controls

Why GuideIT

Through their breadth and depth of technology skills to manage a complex infrastructure environment, GuideIT deployed a set of best practices and processes to provide an improved result for the bank’s technology environment. GuideIT deployed and managed a set of technology metrics that allowed for greater transparency of performance, resiliency, and predictable results for the constituents and end users of the bank.

The best practices approach would create the foundation of operational excellence for the bank’s IT environment to achieve greater results measured by service level performance as well as on-time delivery and within budget. The underlying cost structure converted from a fixed to variable cost structure to support the scalability and allowed the bank to realize a lower expense ratio while improving quality; items such as managing telecom cost and utilization of cloud technologies yield greater economic benefit. Having access to critical skill sets that otherwise would be difficult to hire and retain would be of additional value to the organization.

The Implementation

GuideIT began with a consultative approach that included the creation of a project plan and acceptance criteria based on ITIL best practices standards. In preparation for transition, GuideIT established a training program to ensure understanding of the applications being transferred for a seamless transition of services. During transition, a command center was created in order to closely track and monitor progress and remediate issues immediately. Post-transition agreed upon responsibilities were assumed and service metric collection began.

1. Assessment and Planning – Conducted a project initiation workshop to level-set stakeholders on what must be accomplished and by when to develop successful acceptance criteria and to ensure controls were in place for a smooth transition of services support.
2. Implementation – Developed a plan to perform due diligence for all operational service areas to collect existing procedural documentation to prepare for transition into GuideIT’s ITIL based operational practices.
3. Training – Developed and rolled out intense multi-week training prior to cutover as part of the service desk transition in order to ensure GuideIT expertise in the applications and related security roles transferring to GuideIT.
4. Command Center – Created a command center to track and monitor all reported issues during coverage hours from 7am to 7pm to ensure a successful transition of all the banking and operational centers.
5. Post Go-Live – Assumed operational responsibility of the bank’s IT environment and worked closely with the bank’s IT leadership to monitor and measure all post transition operations. The collection and tabulation of all agreed upon service metrics began in preparation for monthly service level reporting.

The Results

• Reduced operational requirements of IT leadership
• Improved IT solutions and responsiveness to the business
• Greater linkage to IT initiatives to support the business initiatives
• Decreased efficiency cost ratios for the organization
• Use of Industry best practices for support and security services
• Ability to support increased IT demand with a variable pricing structure
• Seamless integration with the internal IT department to function as one-team