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IT Support & Maintenance Services
Buyer's Guide |
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13. Case studies: IT Support and Maintenance
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Case Studies: IT Support and Maintenance
- Small Business: 15 employee company
- Mid Market: 200 employee company
- Enterprise: 15,000 employee company
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Case Study 1
Size of the company: Small (15 employees)
Industry: Healthcare
Overview of the company and its issues: A healthcare company has been established since 1996 and has 15 employees. With ever increasing emphasis being put upon health and safety in the workplace, their services help their clients meet their legal or occupational health obligations. The company specialises in offering medical services, including alcohol and drug testing.
Their headquarters in London coordinates visits to any UK location, offering 24-hour, 365-day service.
Objective: The company was looking for a vendor to assist them in the long term, as the business grew. The requirements were to deliver support up to 24 hours a day 7 days a week, with rapid on site response times, to meet the budgetary requirements of the business, to implementing desktop PCs and servers based on Microsoft Technologies and to ensure that whatever is implemented is capable of expanding as the company grew.
Solution: A vendor designed a solution based on integrating technologies from a core group of manufacturers and service providers. In brief these consisted of custom built PCs and HP PCs, Microsoft Windows 2003 Small Business Server, Watchguard Firewall, Avaya IP Office PBX, Netgear LAN Switching Equipment and Trend Client Server Messaging Suite for Small Business. In addition the vendor provided services such as 24x7 on site support and Least Cost Routing for best value telephone calls.
Result: A vendor has worked side by side the healthcare company for many years. Since installation a company has gone through significant growth, and has been extremely successful in its target market. As demand has increased so the systems have scaled. Extra users are easily added to the existing infrastructure as required. Being service focused the company is always looking for ways to utilise new technology to service their client's needs, and rely on a vendor to recommend new versions of software as they become available. As the company provides a 24 hour nationwide service, vendor engineers are on hand 24 x 7 providing rapid response and hardware swap out to all problems
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1. Introduction
2. What are IT Support Services?
3. Types of IT support
4. Types of IT Maintenance Support Solutions
5. Advantages and disadvantages of IT Support Types
6. Advantages and disadvantages of IT Maintenance Types
7. Advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing IT Support and Maintenance
8. When should we outsource IT support services?
9. Selecting an IT Support services provider
10. Questions to put to potential IT Service Providers
11. IT Support Contracts
12. Pricing of IT Support Services
13. Case studies: IT Support and Maintenance
14. Frequently Asked Questions about IT Support Services and IT Support Contracts
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Case Study 2
Size of the company: Mid Market (200 employees)
Industry: Retailing
Overview of the company and its issues: The retailer with 200 employees was considering outsourcing the maintenance of all applications to redirect internal staff to work on mission-critical development applications and to minimise overall costs for IT. Application systems maintenance for the retailer involved ownership of the entire gamut of over 75 applications spanning a wide range of platforms: mainframes (IBM, AS/400), Unix, client server and web-based technologies. Applications interfaces with third-party products, for example, CRM packages like Clarify. The retailer was looking for a vendor who was financially stable, could provide uncompromising support and meet stringent service levels.
Objective: 7x24 applications support and enhancements for applications in the business areas: finance, inventory and logistics, marketing, advertising and pricing, stores, database management, services, human resources, infrastructure, data warehousing
Solution:A vendor involved providing IT support services for break fixes 24x7 in order to correct production problems during system break-downs; Production support in order to analyse problems where the system ran as designed but the outcome is incorrect; Scheduled IT maintenance which included routine maintenance tasks or preventive maintenance tasks resulting from break-fix problems; Business sustenance in order to research or enhance requests generated by business users; and Proactive monitoring during critical or peak season processing.
Result: The retailer gained several advantages as they worked with an IT outsourced support team: Faster reaction time for ramping up or down resources with knowledge of the retailer's application systems for support or other development projects; Access to vendor's specialist support services such as database support, operations support, system services, hardware; Effective cost/resource utilisation
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Case Study 3
Size of the company: Enterprise (15,000 employees)
Industry: Healthcare
Overview of the company and its issues: Driven to speed product development and patent approval while competing against other brands and lower-cost generics, pharmaceutical companies are under pressure to streamline operations, increase efficiencies and improve results. A major pharmaceutical company works to address these imperatives through a commitment to supporting strategic IT initiatives internally and using a best of breed partner to deliver routine computing services.
Objective:Outsource mission-critical, but non-strategic, IT operations such as administrative functions and service-desk support.
Solution:Support for a collection of multi-vendor mainframe and midrange platforms running administrative and back-office applications. With a team of more than 100 employees on site, a vendor staffs the company?s 24x7x365 data centre operations, and the vendor's computing support centre provides support for Lotus Notes and manages a Remote Access Center of Excellence (COE). In all, vendor's outsourcing services support some 15,000 employees. The organisation initially asked the vendor to provide service-desk support Monday through Friday, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. But when conditions changed, the client needed vendor support services 24x7x365, which is a significant increase in requirements. The client gave the vendor just one month to make this transition. By making the best possible use of resources, vendor was able to deliver the needed levels of support within the required timeframe. Vendor now manages this organisation?s remote computing operations.
From handling employee requests to managing installations and providing ongoing telephone support, the vendor has complete responsibility for the client's Remote Access COE. As more employees telecommute, the demands placed on this COE continue to grow.
Result:Reduced IT costs. Streamlined operations. Increased service levels. By working with the vendor, this organisation has been able to offload a tremendous amount of end-user support from its per month. In addition, the Lotus Notes support team handles some 850 tickets, while the Remote Access Service Desk addresses approximately 320 tickets in an average month. By leveraging vendor?s resources, infrastructure and expertise, this pharmaceutical giant has been able to control and avoid costs while redeploying in-house resources to more strategic IT initiatives.
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IT Support Services UK
This guide is aimed at business decision makers researching IT Support Services UK or a focus on geographical regions, for example IT Support Services London
In this paper the term IT Support covers the following:
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Network Support |
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Computer Support |
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Hardware support |
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Software Support |
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Applications Support |
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IT Audit & Consultancy |
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Server Support |
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IT Department Outsourcing
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14. Frequently Asked Questions about IT Support Services and IT Support Contracts
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Q. What alternatives exist?
Outsourcing is one of a wide range of possible management strategies. Considering "in-house" strategies include:
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Inaction: Do nothing. We're doing a great job already. |
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Cuts Projects: Eliminate wasteful projects (especially those that require an excessive investment). |
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Cut Jobs: Eliminate jobs. Load more work onto existing staff. |
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Reallocate Resources: Shuffle personnel to new, more effective tasks. (Training may be required. Transitions could be bumpy.)
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Q. Can we avoid Outsourcing?
Yes. When a work group, however large and complex, has been mismanaged through neglect, lack of vision and poor processes, outsourcing might not be the only answer. Improvement of business processes before outsourcing can avoid those outsourcings that occur based solely on "cost savings." But even good management and leadership cannot escape the compelling advantages of certain types of "strategic outsourcing" that adds a strategic benefit beyond mere cost savings.
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Q. What are managed services?
Managed services are services that are managed and delivered in partnership with the private sector, typically performed by staff employed by the private sector partner at the direction of the staff employed by the public sector partner..
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