FIH Bank Acquired Greater Structure and Clarity for Their IT
- Efecte Gives Full Value for Money
Efecte beats its competitors in terms of price, installation time and finished result. So says Søren Bay Clausen, Assistant Director at FIH Bank in Denmark. After implementing Efecte, the IT department of FIH has become more efficient, and has acquired greater structure and clarity.
In recent years, FIH Corporate and Investment Bank in Denmark has been undergoing a period of change. Complexity of IT has increased which has presented the IT department with a tough task in living up to expectations in terms of anticipated service levels, efficiency, change management, and keeping track of the hardware and software in the network.
“We had to do something, particularly in relation to support requests, because we had problems keeping track of them and establishing clarity about what we were spending our time on,” says Assistant Director Søren Bay Clausen.
Need for Structure and Enhanced Processes
The goal was to find a solution that would provide both a better structure and enhanced processes, and which would make IT more visible and comprehensible throughout the organization. At the end of 2007, Clausen therefore began to scan the market for a solution. A large array of vendors was contacted – including the largest IT vendors, who were rejected after the first meetings.
“Those solutions would have cost at least five times more than systems like Efecte. It was clear to us that they would be far more complicated to install and run than smaller solutions,” he says. So he decided to include three smaller players in the final round – including Efecte, with which he was rather impressed.
“Efecte seemed to be the best system on the market for controlling the infrastructure, but I was sceptical about the company’s promise that they could be ready to launch in just 50 days.” Efecte made it clear that they could do it within the 50 days and that was one of the reasons for choosing Efecte.
An Incredibly Good Service Desk
The changes are particularly noticeable at the service desk, as all support requests are now systematically registered. “Now we can more easily find the problems we need to solve, and prioritize the most business-critical issues. At the same time, we are also able to document the service levels as request handling and response time are automatically updated in the system.”
For the staff in customer support, the improvements have also been striking. “We work much more as a team now than we did before, and we have acquired a joint attitude for serving our customers. Instead of arguing about whether things are going well, we solve the problem on the basis of our Service Level Agreements, and we can see that we respond to 90 percent of requests within the agreed time – that’s what I call an intelligent solution.”
A Functional System
Another very important function is documentation. Efecte system automatically generates an overview of the entire IT infrastructure via what’s called a CMDB. So far, Efecte has scanned more than 5,500 hardware assets, while 2,600 applications and configuration items have been imported into the system.
“Thanks to Efecte and the CMDB, change management is now much more of a ‘live process’ for us, and is almost fully automated. It is also much easier to implement changes, since we know who is using our systems currently, which means we can also find the best time to alter the production environment without creating problems. Change management has thereby become simple, daily routine for us.”
“CMDB was phase 1, and the next phase will be Software Asset Management. Right now we’re able to manage without it, but we can see that Efecte is a turnkey solution which has the potential to solve this task as well,” continues Clausen, who foresees that he will find other corners of the system that will also be useful to the bank.
About FIH Erhvervsbank
FIH Erhvervsbank has a staff of 350 people working in five offices in Denmark. http://www.fih.dk/
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