Nov 15, 2021
Your road to leaner and digitized production support operations
Over the recent past, the financial services industry has seen a rapid acceleration in the adoption of digital technologies, and has embraced smarter, leaner operating models, especially within IT support functions. Apart from ongoing digital revolution, this acceleration has also been triggered by the increasing need for companies to curtail costs. Digital disruption is the current ‘mantra’ for some of the world’s top banks and financial institutions, especially when it comes to technology support services.
But what are companies looking for in a next generation IT support model? Key desired benefits are:
- Automation of a significant proportion of IT support processes
- Substantial reduction in TCO
- Reduced ticket volume
- Enhanced team productivity
- Decrease in SLA or governance reporting overheads
This may seem like a wish list. However, the above outcomes are vital, if banks want to channel their ‘run the bank’ cost and effort to fuel ‘change the bank’ initiatives. In this blog, we will take a look at an effective way to realize these objectives.
Differentiated Model to drive Digital Support Transformation
A next generation support model should not only be stable, reliable, cost-effective and scalable, but should also use an integrated approach to truly realize the power of digitization. An ideal multi-level support model should integrate disparate application, environment, infrastructure (software and hardware) and technology modules. It should cover a wide range of services including monitoring, resolution, command center operations, release management, preventive maintenance, currency management, consolidation and application maintenance.
The key challenge here is not limited to just identifying and deploying the right tools. Banks and FIs must also address the tremendous cultural shift involved in the transformation. It becomes tougher to address these challenges with increasing organizational size and complexity. Automation and state-of-the-art digital technologies alone will not help resolve these issues.
We think the following elements are critical in order to establish an integrated NextGen support model:
- A robust transformation framework to help shift support engagements to the desired end-state
- A high percentage of automated processes, covering monitoring, health checks, resolution, releases and governance reporting
- Cognitive automation
- Predictive analytics of events, root cause and resolution
- Automatic interpretation of user inquiries and response formulation
- ‘Self-Healing’ to automate complex manual decision making
- Coverage across support horizontals such as service desk, command center and batch monitoring
Companies can achieve seamless automation by customizing commercially available tools and leveraging digital technologies and libraries. However, as process efficiency is an important lever in the overall digital journey, both automation and process efficiency levers should be combined to realize a powerful NextGen support model.
How Mature is your Support Automation?
Before even transforming the support model, it is important for any bank to assess the automation maturity of their support services. The graph below demonstrates our automation maturity model based on 25 different factors:
