For the banking group, considered to be the largest by equity in the Arab World, introducing and adopting ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes was considered to be a sure shot way to help improve service delivery, quality and customer satisfaction.

Piecing it all together

Managing Arab Bank’s IT operations, going by any estimates, is not an easy job to do. With over 12 IT centres worldwide in Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates (serving Bahrain, Qatar and Yemen), and the UK (serving France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Cyprus, Singapore, Australia and the USA), the bank employs 6,000 staff of which 2,500 are based in Jordan alone.

Of the total 300 IT staff managing the infrastructure and operations, 150 are based in Jordan, with the IT team collectively responsible for managing 3,850 PCs and nearly 300 laptops in Jordan alone.

Each IT centre also supports a local team responsible for day-to-day operations, field support and second level support for business staff, while the global team based out of Amman handles designing, selecting and implementing systems for all IT centres besides providing Level-3 support.

With the bank experiencing sustained growth, Arab Bank felt that it would need to stay on top of global trends and be innovative in the way it uses IT to support its business. Unification, therefore, sat at the heart of its growth strategy.

“We were facing a number of issues which led us to the conclusion that we needed a unified, best-of-breed tool,” said Maher S. Zananiri, Senior Project Manager in the bank's IT Strategic Planning Group

“We were spending too much time fire-fighting, not all calls were being logged and it was difficult to track calls once they had been assigned,” he recalled. “There was no follow-up on second line activity, little management information, and a lack of accurate asset and configuration data. The tools we had in place also did not allow issues to be escalated efficiently.”

For its IT Service Management (ITSM) Arab Bank was relying on a mixture of tools, either developed in-house or sourced from external suppliers. But to change this scenario, the first step the bank took was to launch a Process Enhancement Project, in which working procedures of all IT centres were documented and mapped. Reviews with managers were carried out, which included deleting redundant steps, using forms to improve management and follow-up, and identifying workflows to automate processes.

In with ITIL

Mapping to the ITIL framework for the bank seemed a natural choice. “Proper implementation of ITIL was regarded as crucial in helping improve service delivery and quality, thus improving customer satisfaction and lowering costs,” commented Ma'n Zada, IT Strategic Planning Manager. “We needed a solutions supplier which understood it thoroughly.”

Although ITIL was only in its infancy in Jordan, Arab Bank saw its investment in ITIL-based frameworks as an investment in a growing global trend, especially in view of its operations supporting a substantial international branch network.

“We believed the introduction of ITIL boosts the image and stature of organisations and their IT centres. Furthermore, implementation of common standards and language is a major benefit,” Zada added.

The bank also needed a solution with Arabic language capability and was looking specifically for one that would correct and prevent errors and delays, enhance productivity by identifying and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), clarify process ownership, roles and responsibilities and improve internal and external co-ordination amongst groups.

To achieve this, it decided to implement a single, integrated solution and following comprehensive review chose the assyst from Axios Systems.

“Having a single tool gave us the benefits of standardisation, efficient support and economies of scale,” Zada added.

“We selected Axios because it is focused on ITIL and ITSM,” said Basil Abdel Nabi, Deputy Head of IT. “ITIL was considered essential for aligning IT services with the business and providing full transparency our IT operations,” Nabi added. “assyst was built from inception around the ITIL framework.”

“Availability of an Arabic-language service was also mission-critical. assyst Unicode-compliant and therefore supports any language,” he said.

Rolling it on

assist,following its initial deployment at the bank’s IT centre in Amman to support Jordanian staff, is now set for a global roll out starting with Egypt, Lebanon, the UAE and the UK.

The bank is also taking advantage of assystDiscovery, an integrated asset inventory information system to strategically control one of their largest investments. “assist Discovery provides us with automatic and accurate data on all our assets and ensures our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is continually up-to-date,” Nabi said.

The next set of investments in and around the core solution will include the Web-based self-service companion product for assyst, assystNET, which will be implemented across the board to help staff log and track their own incidents, easing pressure on the Help Desk and giving end-users greater control and sense of involvement.

Using assyst for managing Service Level Agreements and harnessing its knowledge base to enable the Help Desk staff to handle FAQs and quicker and more accurate information to customers is also in the pipeline.