Bankwest streamlines IT shop, ups availability

Beverley Head
Monday, 07 September 2009 09:26

IT Industry - Market

The investment in Service Manager 7 is intended to help streamline IT operations and improve service levels.  In the past the bank used two different tools to manage its change, configuration, problem, incident, release and service desk processes.

“From a cost point of view there is no duplication of effort. There is a single configuration management database and we can find information quicker. It is possible to isolate problems much faster to put in a fix. This is all about information sharing and mitigating risk.

“The driver for us putting this in place is that we want to make sure we can service our customers and it pushes up availability statistics.”

Bankwest has also established a Business Availability Centre in its IT shop which allows it to run synthetic transactions on its network which can be analysed to build up a series of metrics against which the bank can measure its performance and plan and execute responses to outages. Known as the Business Dashboard the system is available to both IT and the business.

“We categorise the systems in the bank from A to E where A are your bank breakers - for example the systems that transfer funds between banks. But say a system that gives you cash falls over at 4 in the morning then that is not a problem as the branches aren’t open then.

“Using Service Manager 7 and the Business Availability Centre allows that prioritisation to happen automatically,” Rees explained.