Model critical services first, and grow the project from there

For financial institutions, IT outages are a blade that cuts twice. First, since so much of a typical bank’s business relies on technology to execute transactions, IT service disruptions have an immediate, pressing and expensive business impact. Second, such outages have become an unavoidable public affair that dominate headlines, jeopardize public trust and damage reputations. As such, preventing outages, or fixing them quickly when they do occur, has become synonymous with protecting revenue, wealth and brand identity.

This was precisely the goal for one of our customers -- an investment bank with approximately $300 Billion USD under management. With in excess of 10, 000 employees, a dozen regional headquarters and more than 600 branches in 20-plus countries, the health, availability and performance of the bank’s IT infrastructure is pivotal to its ability to provision corporate and consumer banking services, as well as offer trading and asset management for institutional clients.  

To mitigate the business impact of IT outages, the bank shifted gears from managing individual IT components to managing IT from a service perspective. Business Service Management, or BSM, promised to provide the bank with the ability to dynamically link underlying IT components according to the service being delivered. The desired result was an interactive model of critical services that visualizes the relationships and dependencies of the IT components that collectively comprise a service. Examples of services include online trading, credit card processing and inter-bank trading platforms.