The Australian Department of Defence achieved a 1200 percent return on investment for end user productivity by preempting IT problems before end users were affected by them, cutting downtime of core services.
Australia’s Defence agency changed its IT approach from being reactive to more preemptive to streamline its IT operations, and improve system performance and end user experience. The agency’s IT division, the Chief Information Officer Group (CIOG), manages one of the largest IT networks in Australia, conducting business of about AUD$1.3 billion.
Defence IT teams had been working in a reactive cycle, caused by high workloads, limited visibility of performance and insufficient support capabilities. These challenges prevented them from detecting and resolving issues before end users were affected by them.
Defence partnered with Microsoft to take a sequential approach to improve activities, and focused on people and processes, rather than just technology. Microsoft ensured that staff were making the most effective use of their time by performing more preemptive and less reactive tasks. They also captured the labour effort of these tasks, and provided the CIOG with a method to define current and future workforce numbers and the roles needed to support technologies.
The result of this partnership was a significant increase in active issue detection and correction. CIOG’s Technical Director of Application Hosting Services, Kathy Porecki, said, “In one of our support teams, we detected almost 400 incidents caused by 10 to 15 problems in a six-month period, without end users reporting them. They were resolved with no outages to the environment and problems were identified within a reduced timeframe.”
Defence IT teams now spend less time reacting to issues, and are focused on more preventive and diagnostic activities. As a result of this, more resources are made available for other high-value activities. The CIOG achieved a 200 percent ROI on its labour by performing more preemptive tasks and 1200 percent ROI on end user productivity by increasing uptime of core services.
Report: Medha Basu
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