CSC nears end of IT service transformation

CSC Australia is a year away from ridding itself of a complex legacy IT service management architecture as part of a major transformation project that is now going global.

The IT outsourcer is gradually bringing off-contract customers onto a new BMC Remedy platform as they sign new agreements.

It's a process that started when Remedy went into production at the end of 2006, according to CSC's Australian-based global Remedy development manager, Andrea Wilton-Connell.

"At the time, we had a large portion of our outsourcing business coming up for ‘rebid' in the forthcoming 18 month period," Wilton-Connell said.

"We knew it was highly probable during rebid that clients were going to ask for IT infrastructure library (ITIL)-based integrated [service management] solutions. We wanted to get ahead of the requests and have a solution ready to go."

Of the contracts up for renewal, "some of them went straight back into contract negotiations and a number went out to market.

"We won the vast bulk of them back again," Wilton-Connell said.

"[But] if we hadn't been able to offer [an integrated service management platform] there's every possibility we'd not have their business."

Wilton-Connell said about 19 local accounts remained on the legacy system.

Once they were transitioned, CSC would cut off the legacy system, which consisted of a mix of tools to individually cover all the functions that typically make up IT service management.

Incident management ran on a mix of CA and legacy Remedy tools, Wilton-Connell said. Change management used an in-house system; problem management ran on an in-house built Lotus Notes database system; and asset management used a mix of Remedy "and a tool called Asset Management Initiative".

Clients were shielded from the complexity: "They probably didn't notice all the manual work going on in the background in disparate systems because they got their [end-of-month] reports on time," Wilton-Connell said.

But for CSC the aim was - and still is - clear.

"We want to close down the legacy system," Wilton-Connell said.

"It will probably take a further 12 months to get rid of all the legacy tools within CSC Australia."

Export quality

What started as a transformation project in Australia is now the basis for a wider global deployment.

"As soon as it became apparent the solution we'd developed would be picked up globally, CSC Australia put in place a new vertical organisation [about two years ago]. My program moved into that organisation," she said.

The global Remedy rollout has three "streams" - development, deployment and support. The development team, managed by Wilton-Connell, "is based entirely out of Australia.

"We cover all the CSC regions globally," she said. The team numbers about 30 staff.

"Then there's regional deployment and support organisations but the best practice for these is coming out of Australia."

New Remedy

Apart from shutting shop on a legacy architecture, benefits of the new system included being able to give clients online, real-time access to data and the ability for CSC "to assess historical incidents and look for patterns to predict and address potential problems before they occur."

"Now if there's a change in the system you can look to see whether there have been incidents that led to the change request," Wilton-Connell said.

"Having access to information between process areas" meant faster service for customers at a lower cost, she said.