By Denise Dubie
Following its 2004 merger with Bank One and the end of its $5 billion outsourcing contract with IBM Global Services, JPMorgan Chase faced the challenges of consolidating dozens of IT tools, streamlining existing processes and building in-house a consistent, mature, global service desk.
Once IT executives embarked on the service-desk improvement project, they found the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practices framework could help achieve the company’s goals of reduced complexity and better customer satisfaction.
“We weren’t using the term ITIL or COBIT at the time, but we were talking about documenting processes and doing everything consistently around the world,” says Robert Barnes, global vice president at JPMorgan Chase in Newark, Delaware. With 700 people reporting to him, Barnes says spreading the word on consistent processes became a top priority.“I was expecting to see a lot of efficiencies and consolidation of processes. Depending on the regio n, we didn’t have the same people doing the same tasks, so we had to be flexible to a degree to make it work.”
Barnes found that the processes laid out in ITIL aligned with plans to improve incident priority management at JPMorgan Chase. He says he wanted to be able to pull teams together more easily, respond to three levels of incident severity, and more quickly address and resolve customer calls. The goal was to have the seven disparate service desks operate transparently as one to customers, and doing so required that he dedicate people on staff to champion the adoption of
the processes laid out in ITIL.
“In the old days, I would say,‘Let’s figure out what process is not working and change it,’ but we didn’t have all our processes fully documented at that time,” Barnes says. “There is a challenge in getting people to first understand they have to document everything, and then the best practices become a living and breathing creature that need to be consistently maintained.”
His team focused on getting incident, problem and change-management processes in place that would best suit the global customer base. With the processes laid out, reducing the number of tools in use across the company’s locations became a priority. Because of the geographic locations of service desks and the acquisition of different tools via merged companies, Barnes says JPMorgan Chase had four incident-management tools, 14 change-control systems, four knowledge management tools and 25 request tools.
Today JPMorgan Chase has a streamlined set of processes and fewer systems that deliver“very mature metrics,” Barnes says. Now JPMorgan Chase has just one incident-management tool, one change-control system, one knowledge management tool and four request tools. Barnes says having standard tools helps his team focus on resolving issues rather than learning the differences among technologies.
“Our goal continues to be to reduce
our impact to the customer internally and
externally. We will continue to work toward
reducing our mean time to repair,” he says.
To date, the service desk maintains 93% customer satisfaction ratings and a 75% first-call resolution rate (which means the customer problem is solved with the first line of support at JPMorgan Chase without requiring input from a higher staff member).
The company also requires that 80% of calls coming into the service desk be answered within 20 seconds, the result of which is that fewer than 3% of calls are abandoned by the customer.
In the big picture, Barnes says the ITIL process improvements let JPMorgan Chase eliminate 500,000 calls to the service desk by tracking common problems and working with the lines of business that own the problem to fix it at its root.
“We were able to reduce the need for people to call the desk because those issues don’t arise as often or can be resolved more easily,” he explains.“Being able to identify and solve common problems gives us the chance to improve existing services and introduce new services that bring value to the customers.”
According to Barnes, industry research firm Gartner in the past has ranked JPMorgan Chase’s service desk as one of the most mature in the financial services industry, but he says he isn’t getting complacent with that status. He says this year’s goal is to reduce service desk calls by another 500,000 through various techniques including self-service features, consolidated password platforms and single-sign-on processes.
While working with ITIL processes has proven successful for JPMorgan Chase, Barnes advises others not to“bite off too much or jump in too deep” with any best-practices framework until it proves its case to the business.
“No matter the framework, if it doesn’t bring you to market faster and better, then you have to ask yourself,‘Why I am doing this?’ The key is to go into process improvements with your eyes wide open and take baby steps and let it prove itself,” Barnes says.“ITIL has got to support and enable your core product.”
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