Dimension Data Managed Services, the division responsible for providing managed services as well as technology deployment, maintenance and service to approximately 80% of large corporates in SA, is reshaping its service offering.
KC van Straaten, executive director of Dimension Data Managed Services, says customers are demanding "transformational services" to deal with change and change management.
"There is a demand for a range of services in the market today that addresses the complexity of change, from conception to deployment and on-going management of the process," he says.
"At Dimension Data, we are very serious about IT service management within our business because we want to make a difference at the business performance level. We are offering our customers multiple technology suites, each of which presents its own change management challenges.
"So, when it came to a change management tool, we were not looking for a point solution - but for a solution that would manage an aggregation of services."
Dimension Data turned to a solution developed by Quintica SA, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) software solution and services supplier, to achieve its goals.
Based on Marval software, the ITIL-based service management solution was designed to support Dimension Data's provision of world-class service levels to its customers.
"Service excellence has always been the cornerstone of our offering," he says. "By partnering with Quintica SA, and finalising the deployment of ITIL best practices within our organisation, we will not only meet our requirements for providing a comprehensive service to our customer environments, but demonstrate that there is a better way to achieve service excellence internally too."
Van Straaten says, in searching for a solution, he found that many of the technology vendors were in reality help-desk tool vendors - rather than providers of integrated IT service management solutions. The majority of solutions offered are old generation.
"When we saw Marval, we were struck by how complete and integrated it was in supporting the ITIL best practices disciplines - right out of the box."
He says that introducing ITIL disciplines to Dimension Data put a responsibility on the company to "stack" its own service offerings in such a way that the systems, processes and skills within the organisation became aligned.
"This required an ITIL-driven change within our own organisation - from a technology-oriented to a more integrated, business-focused mindset - as the marketplace needs for transformational services led us to review our own service infrastructure.
"We had to re-engineer our strategies by introducing substantial changes at the systems and process layers of our service 'stack'."
Van Straaten says one of the first tasks assigned to the Marval system was to address two pressing requirements. Firstly, to act as a catalyst for instilling ITIL process as a culture in the organisation. Secondly, to use the system for improving the level of customer experience at the point of first call.
"We have streamlined our call centre operation, reducing the number of call centres worldwide in a bid to cut costs and improve our service offering.
"We now have one call centre in place in SA, instead of 22, and we have adopted one management process worldwide, together with a single integrated voice and data system," he says.
"We also employ Marval's Service Desk, Incident Management and Problem Management solutions within our call centre, enabling us to operate in an information-rich environment that employs the latest ITIL technologies to manage our processes using ITIL's 'best practice' principles.
"Our staff now have access to data that allows us to be predictive and proactive in our thinking, encompassing predictive problem analysis, change management and capacity planning disciplines," says Van Straaten.
"Essentially, this means we have moved up the value chain and we are constantly looking for scenarios that may present problems in the future and take corrective action immediately.
"We also analyse common problems and their resolutions, so that we might learn from previous experiences and introduce change in a positive way."
Van Straaten says the Marval-based system ideally suits Dimension Data's requirements because it caters for all system types, supports the company's future direction (which is to introduce ITIL as a company-wide management platform) and is able to import and process data from a variety of different sources.
"We have realised efficiency enhancements from the Marval system which are sustainable," he says. "A significant benefit is its ability to allow us to interface at the 'engineering level' and capture the core of any problem or incident and work with issues associated with that directly.
"Because so much of Marval embodies ITIL processes, we don't have to build too many management layers on top of them. This has enabled us to reduce costs substantially," he notes.
Recognition of Dimension Data's efforts has come from the right source, the customers themselves. "In a poll conducted recently, customers whom we have migrated to Marval gave us the highest satisfaction rating. Proof that we are meeting a multiplicity of demands with the most appropriate and efficient responses," claims Van Straaten.
He adds that the introduction of Marval has been a "catalyst for change and improvement" within Dimension Data. "It has inspired our engineers and has given them a 'change management' capability that they did not have before.
"As we are committed to making continuous improvement in our IT service delivery, our goal is now to drive the finalisation of ITIL and its principles throughout our organisation, overcoming the challenges that this 'cultural change' will bring in its wake with the specialised training programmes that Quintica SA offers."
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