Executive Summary
WIND Hellas is a major telecommunications provider in Greece today, with over 3.5 million customers. Within 20 years, the Company has been established as a technology pioneer and has offered innovative products that have changed consumer communication. Today, WIND Hellas is the only integrated telecom operator in Greece offering Mobile, Fixed and Internet services from a single point of sale and service and under one, comprehensive invoice for the customer.
Cognity successfully designed and implemented the highly value-added User Experience solution for the commercial applications of WIND's Points-of-Sale. The solution is a strategic business-centric approach to Business Service Management (BSM) as it effectively addresses WIND's imperative requirement of aligning technology services with business services plus monitoring and measuring the service quality of the user experience for its commercial applications. The BSM solution was carried out by Cognity, in collaboration with the IT team of WIND, using HP’s Business Process Monitor (BPM) tool. As a result of this implementation, WIND has dramatically improved its visibility into the availability and performance of its critical business services monitored by the new solution.
Business Challenges
The main business challenges addressed in the context of this project were:
- Achieve business alignment and minimize business impact
- Inform the business of what is happening end-to-end in real-time
- Identify business service performance problems before customers do
- Develop efficient IT Service Management (ITSM) processes to:
- Reduce duplication of effort and wasted energy
- Eliminate inefficient resource allocation
- Speed up solution development
- Proactively warn application owners and business operations of impending problems
- Monitor business services from a user's point of view
- Rapidly isolate application performance problems
- Recover from transaction-oriented IT problems
- Know where the business transactions are in the process
- Know which transactions are affected by an IT problem
Turning Vision into Results
Cognity designed and implemented the User Experience solution at WIND stores - a unique top-down approach to Business Service Management - so as to manage IT services from a business prospective. This enabled WIND to monitor, measure and manage their services according to the impact on business and to establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs). WIND is now in the position to proactively identify problems before they affect end-users, so when they do occur WIND can quickly isolate, triage, diagnose and fix them with minimal interference to their business.
Additionally, the solution has simplified the process of understanding and controlling the IT elements of WIND by giving the required visibility into the dynamic relationships between their services, supporting applications and underlying infrastructure.
Using HP’s End User Management (EUM) tools, we have enabled Wind to proactively monitor application availability and performance by emulating end-user business processes against applications on a 24x7 basis, thus assessing business impact, across multiple domains and geographies and managing end-user performance from a range of IT devices.
Cognity is continuously extending the above solution by including additional critical business services and providing Maintenance & Technical support services to Wind.
In brief, the User Experience implementation at Wind has contributed to:
- Reduce System Health check time by 97%
- Reduce the MTTR by 90%
- Improve availability of mission-critical applications by 99.8%
- Improve the performance of real-time platforms to meet the 99.999% SLA
- Reduced Support Queues by 73%
- Reduced Severity 1 incidents by 65%
- Reduced end-users' impact hours by 96.2%
- Customer & Mission alignment
The key sucess factors of the project were:
- Cognity’s strong technical competence coupled with in-depth understanding of the business domain
- Quality of the deliverables
- Strict adherence to the agreed time-plan
- Wind’s management commitment and internal competence
Cognity is continuously extending the above infrastructure and provides Maintenance & Technical support services to Wind, based on a SLA.