Customer Objective
A leading provider of investment and business solutions that supports more than 21,000 financial advisors across the country needed to regain control of IT incidents being routed through the company’s IT Service Management (ITSM) team to its Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) team, simplify complicated IT processes, and more quickly and easily scale automation.
Facing Complexity and Problematic Scripts
The ITSM team was inundated with requests, most of which had to be routed to their I&O team. While they had some respite in the form of scripts, these scripts created more work as they were not audit-friendly or secure. Too many of them were complex and long owing to the multiple systems with which they had to connect.
The majority of IT incidents reported were based on key issues from the firm’s Windows-based services:
- Disk space issues
- Server and service problems
- Password resets
- Account unlocks
- VMWare resets
- Outdated knowledge base articles
As the team couldn’t keep working with pain points caused by scripts and complexity, automation emerged as the ideal solution for much-needed change.
Making Automation a Priority
The firm acknowledged the need to make automation a strategic priority. They added an all-new role to the team: VP of Tech Automation. This leader, responsible for creating and scaling automation, found Resolve Actions to be the perfect fit with its power to help future-proof the business as automation complexity grew.
The solution eased current problems and automated the unmanageable volume of repetitive tasks and processes, particularly in incident response. Resolve Actions unlocked positive changes, including:
- Improved efficiency
- Greater confidence within the entire IT team
- Notable process standardization
- More consistency in service level agreement (SLA) metrics
- Fewer incidents
Putting Automation to the Long-term Test
When the institution began its automation journey with Resolve, they had a big, audacious goal top of mind: to build an automation Center of Excellence (COE) to scale faster and accelerate automations into production.
At the time, a small but mighty team of three made remarkable developments with the ITSM and IT Operations teams and got creative with their existing capacity. Resolve Actions made onboarding new COE team members easy and drastically shortened the learning curve with its basic knowledge and drag-and-drop activities, allowing for easy creation of new automations. It only took a week to get new team members up to speed.
Three other automation silos existed within the organization, and with Resolve Actions, that long-term goal was reached: one automation team that manages all automations for the business. Serving as an orchestrator, Resolve Actions unified those automations already in place, pushing efficiency beyond what the IT team thought was possible.
Scaling Automation to Achieve Big Results
The IT team started small, with automations built and run on Resolve Actions. The next move expanded their automations to integrate with their ticketing platform. From there, Resolve’s Automation Exchange assisted them in scaling to include their observability and Identity and Access Management (IAM) security tools. Automation Exchange provided integration packs that unleashed new heights of scaling, even with less time and fewer people.
Results to write home about include:
- Cost savings of $1.4 million over a three-year period
- An average outage reduction of 20 percent
- An 80 percent average reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) for high-severity incidents
- The ability to scale with less time and fewer people
- Greater efficiency across systems, processes, and team productivity
Check out Resolve Actions to discover how IT automation and orchestration can lead your organization to real results or request a custom demo if you’d like to see how other financial services organizations leverage automation.