Infra provides an enterprise solution for St.George Bank
One of Australia's largest banks, St.George, uses Infra technology as an enterprise application to support a range of critical service management functions, including:
- IT service desks (inbound call centers)
- Change management workflows for IT and business processes
- Integration with network monitoring of bank devices, enabling automated monitoring and servicing of ATMs and LAN servers
- Smart routing of transactions to external service providers.
Infra/St.George statistics
20,000 problem tickets and 140 change requests per week are logged through Infra.
Infra supports:
- 2000 ATM devices
- 350 applications
- 45,000 merchants (i.e. eftpos/point of sale)
- 70,000 combined users of St.George systems.
As a national bank, St.George supports a diverse range of IT and business operations across a geographically dispersed organization.
In addition to its numerous internal applications and systems, the bank has a nationwide network of branches, ATMs and retail point of sale devices, requiring 24-hour monitoring and maintenance.
A fast turnaround of problems is required to keep the network online and ensure minimum disruption to its customers.
Infra technology provides St.George with a means of both managing problems as they occur in its extensive IT infrastructure, and of managing changes to that infrastructure to enable auditing, avoid duplication of effort and ensure best practice change processes.
Business solution
Service desk / Inbound call center support
Four service desks in St.George use Infra to provide national support for all procedural and network problems affecting the bank's branches and their customers, as well as external merchants.
These include errors occurring in the bank's extensive network of ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) and retail eftpos (Point Of Sale) systems.
The service desks play a critical role in the bank's ability to provide a quick turnaround of problems affecting customers, as well as comply with government legislation and external service level agreements.
IT change management
Comprehensive change management processes provide St.George with visibility of all IT changes occurring within the organization, and speed the turnaround of change by automating workflows and approvals.
All changes in the St.George IT production environment are logged, administered, reported on and approved electronically using Infra. These include moving of IT changes into production, ATM installs, decommissioning and modification, user requests and testing.
The integration of change management and help desk processes in a single system enables change requests to be generated from, and tracked back to calls originally logged to the service desks.
Integration with network monitoring
Of the thousands of problem tickets logged through Infra per week, approximately 5000 are logged automatically, directly from physical devices within the bank.
Initially implemented for ATMs (Automated Teller Machines), St.George has expanded automated logging to the bank's network of LAN servers. Automated logging provides immediate notification of errors and alerts, as well as a comprehensive log of all problems or downtime occurring in the bank's devices.
According to Sonja Strupeit, Infra Product Manager with St.George, this provides "an absolute record of when devices fail and why. It gives us a 100% historical record that can be fed back into our problem logging and change management".
Smart routing of transactions to external vendors
Infra's support of service management processes in St.George extends beyond the bank to include the automatic routing of problems to external service providers.
Errors and alerts produced by ATMs and LAN Servers are passed to Infra, which, depending on the problem type and time of day, automatically forwards the resulting job tickets to either branches or third parties responsible for maintaining the devices.
Once service is restored following maintenance, the device sends a code enabling the automatic closure of the problem ticket.
Benefits
A single integrated system supports the lifecycle management of incidents, problems and changes, and provides central configuration (asset) management.
Management of change request workflows in Infra provides visibility of all changes in progress and a clear audit trail, enforces accountability and avoids clashes in scheduling.
Automated error logging supports rapid problem management and captures a full history of problems affecting the bank's hardware devices.
Smart routing to external service providers speeds problem resolution and ensures consistency of those vendors' practices with St.George's business processes.
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