IT Monitoring Governance
Initial situation:
Our client, a global supermarket chain, was struggling to establish adequate monitoring of its IT infrastructure and business-critical applications (various SAP systems, marketing campaign systems, payment systems, checkout systems, etc.). The company decided to launch a project to establish a governance structure to ensure that responsibilities were clearly defined and mechanisms were put in place to better organize and control IT monitoring, ultimately reducing downtime and disruption to business-critical systems.
Our approach:
qedcon provided two consultants specializing in IT governance and provider management. As it is extremely important in this area to properly govern and manage providers and most of the IT services were outsourced to different providers, we wanted to ensure that all aspects of IT oversight and management could be properly addressed.
Challenges and dependencies:
Immediately after the start of the project, the project objective was changed at short notice by the management, as several serious disruptions had led to a significant deterioration in service. Instead of initially developing a governance framework, we were therefore asked to assess the implemented IT monitoring for the most important and critical IT services (more than 40 IT services). qedcon worked with the internal IT monitoring team to develop a comprehensive assessment document, which essentially consisted of a structured interview and a meaningful rating system. This made it easy to identify whether an IT service had an appropriate IT monitoring setup.
Implementation:
The structured interview was first tested with the IT monitoring service and then conducted with over 40 IT services (mainly applications), documented and the results presented to the management.
In parallel, a governance framework was developed from the results of the assessments, which led to a formal policy for IT monitoring and incident management (both areas go hand in hand), the integration of IT monitoring into the existing demand/request processes (based on ServiceNow) and the establishment of an informal community of practice with various subject matter experts for IT monitoring (and event management).
Conclusion:
Thanks to our structured approach, coupled with excellent communication skills and extensive expertise in IT monitoring, our client was able to successfully set up the IT monitoring assessment as a means of determining an appropriate IT monitoring setup.
This assessment is now carried out at least once a year for all IT services and even external auditors refer to this tool in their reports to evaluate IT monitoring.
The newly developed IT governance thus provides the necessary formal basis to accompany the actual practical use of the assessments and has helped to optimize and improve the client's IT monitoring practice.
