Building society automates IT run book processes

Principality Building Society is automating labour and time-intensive IT infrastructure management tasks with a new process automation platform.

The UK's tenth largest building society - with 50 branches and over 420,000 members - needed to introduce more standardised procedures and systems to ensure key management tasks, like system and service restarts, are executed consistently to minimise IT service impact and comply with best practices.

"As with all organisations, our challenge is to make the most efficient use of our resources," said Marc Jones, Principality IT infrastructure support manager. "We were aware that our service desk teams were spending a considerable amount of time on mundane, repetitive tasks."

As an existing user of the IT system management software AppManager from vendor NetIQ, the Cardiff-based society adopted its Aegis process automation platform to model, automate, measure and improve the execution of IT operational run books and procedures.

Principality is using NetIQ Aegis to automate tasks such as server re-boots, event response, server maintenance and new file system updates.

"A management tool that could help automate tasks, such as the creation of service desk incidents for critical system events generated by AppManager, provides us with integration that reduces the complexity of our infrastructure," added Jones.

"This not only helps us to improve IT operations efficiencies, but enables us to reallocate skills, time and resources toward more strategic areas, where we can really add value."

Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.