new IT Organization

A world-renowned, NYC-based entertainment and media company, announced its plans to become an independent operating company, and its formal organizational split from its parent cable company. One of the key challenges for the media company was to develop a fully independent IT services and support function, within 12 months, that replaced its dependency on the former parent company’s central IT service organization.  The media company organization consisted of ~1,200 employees operating in several physical and virtual office locations throughout the U.S.

The media company evaluated several IT services and consulting firms to assist them in this large and aggressive effort, and Iron Key Group was selected as clear choice to assist them in this venture. Iron Key Group’s framework is based on the premise that all organizations must deliver outstanding service on all fronts to increase revenue, control costs and to ultimately deliver a healthy profit. This initial philosophy, coupled with industry best practices that are influenced but not solely driven by such methodologies as ITIL, Lean Six Sigma and PMI, would prove to be the key to the media company’s success with this new initiative.

Iron Key Group began the engagement with a comprehensive analysis of the IT services that were being provided for the media company by its parent company at the time. The results of the analysis were compared against industry best practices, Iron Key Group’s proven framework and methodology, and the media company’s newly defined requirements for service excellence. Several options on how to approach the new IT services offering were developed, including benefit, risk and cost analyses for each. Faced with several options to choose from, which included outsourcing some or all the IT services function to external providers, the company decided to build an internal IT services function influenced by the ITIL methodology that would provide a more intimate, hands-on approach to providing IT-related services to the business. 

Iron Key Group worked with the media company to:

• Develop a formal Project Management Office (PMO) for all relevant Iron Key Group, media company and parent company resources to manage the new IT service initiative
• Develop a detailed work breakdown structure (WBS) and project plan to develop a new company IT services offering. 
• Design and build an entirely new IT service organization consisting of existing and new employees. 
• Write job descriptions, recruit, interview, hire and train new IT employees.
• Collaborate with other IT partners to develop and implement a comprehensive Infrastructure as a Service cloud platform for the firm’s core infrastructure components (servers, network, storage) and Exchange Online for messaging.
• Develop and implement a comprehensive Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) approach that would facilitate Agile and Waterfall methodologies.
• Select and implement ServiceNow as the media company’s ITIL Service Management platform to manage the new IT service organization. 
• Develop and document new operational processes and procedures for Help Desk, Desktop Support, Application Development and Support, Infrastructure Administration and Management, Change Management, IT Procurement (including Mobile Technology Procurement and Management), Asset Management (including Asset Discovery, Tracking and Management from physical, operational and financial perspectives), Technology Standards and IT Security & Compliance Policies. 

The media company’s new high-touch, highly capable IT organization was in place and operational within the project’s 12-month time requirement. The following are some of the tangible results the media company was able to realize:

• The firm’s core infrastructure components (servers, network and storage) was outsourced to CenturyLink’s IaaS solution, enabling the company to increase its level of infrastructure redundancy to reduce risk to production systems, to significantly reduce the amount of time to provision new infrastructure components, and to ensure that all systems were closely managed and monitored on a 24/7/365 basis.
• Microsoft’s Exchange Online was implemented to replace a dated, single-point-of-failure on-premise Exchange 2007 environment.
• ServiceNow was implemented a single-source, best-practice tool to input, track and manage all IT service-related incidents, problems, requests, etc. using the ITIL Service Management methodology.
• The firm’s new IT Service Desk began piloting its new service programs within the first 3 months of the engagement and was effectively servicing all its 1,200 internal customers within 6 months. 
• The company has realized an initial 20% increase in overall IT support response time compared to its parent company’s previous benchmark earlier in the year. The company is targeting even more aggressive service improvements such as increased resolution times, root-cause resolution to prevent issues from reoccurring, self-service catalogs to reduce request and delivery times, etc., as the new Service Desk reaches a stable and steady state in the coming months and years. 
• The company’s new Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process was implemented and resulted in a 15% increase in overall speed of major and minor releases, with at least a 10% decrease in reported bugs and anomalies.

The feedback from the media company’s internal customers and external partners and providers has been extremely positive, and the collaboration between the company and Iron Key Group was considered an unmitigated success.