Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practivces in place and deliver value to the company.

1. ITSM Adoption Forces a Streamlined Operations Culture
that Paves the Way to Better Cloud Use for Desjardins
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is
using ITSM to put best practivces in place and deliver value to the company.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and
moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s
making an impact on people’s lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as
better business results.
Gardner
This time, we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas.
We're here the week of June 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data,
cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Desjardins Group in Montreal is
improving their operations in IT through an advanced IT services management (ITSM) approach.
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To learn more we are joined by Trung Quach, the ITSM Manager at Desjardins. Welcome.
Trung Quach: Thank you very much, Dana, for having us.
Gardner: First tell us a little bit about your organization, for those who aren’t familiar. You're in
the eastern part of Canada and you have a large network of credit unions. Is that correct?
Quach: It’s more cooperative banking. We are around 50,000 people across Québec, and we've
started moving in Canada and the US.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT organization, the size, how many people, how many
datacenters? What sort of IT organization do you have?

2. Quach: We're around 2,500 and counting. We're mainly based in Montréal and Lévis, which is
near Québec City. Most of them are in Montréal, but some technical people are in Lévis.
Gardner: Tell us about your role. What are you doing there as ITSM Manager?
The ITIL process
Quach: I joined Desjardins last year in the ITSM position. This is more about the process, the
ITIL process and everything that's with the tool, as well to support those processes.
Gardner: Tell us why ITSM has become important to you. What were some
of the challenges, some of the requirements? What was the environment you
were in that required you to adopt better ITSM principles?
Quach: A couple of years ago, when they merged 10-plus silos of IT into one
big group, Desjardins needed to centralize the process, put best practice in
place, to be more efficient and competitive, and to give a good value for the
business.
Quach
Gardner: What, in particular, were issues that cropped up as a result of that decentralization?
Was this poor performance, too much cost, too many manual processes, all of the above?
Quach: We had a lot of manual processes and a lot of tools. To be able to measure the
performance of a team, you need to use the same process and the same tools and then measure
yourself on it. You need to optimize the way you do it, so that you give better service.
Gardner: What have been some of the results of your movement towards ITSM? What sort of
benefits have you realized as a result?
Quach: We had many of them. Some were financial, but the most important thing, I think, is the
service it would give, the availability of the service. So one is a reduction in major incidents of
30 percent for the last two years.
Gardner: What is it about your use of ITSM that has led to that reduction in incidents? How
does that translate?
Quach: We put our problem management with incident process as well. We
open tickets and we take care of the incident in a coordinated way at an
enterprise level. So the impact is everywhere. We advise the line of business,
follow up with the incident, and close the incident. We follow up with any
problems and then we fix the real issue so that it doesn’t come back.
Gardner: Have you used this to translate back to any development, custom development in your
organization, or is this more on the operation side strictly?

3. Better support
Quach: We started all this on the operation side. We started last year on the development side.
They're in our process slowly and that’s going to get better on their way through, so we can
support them better.
Gardner: Tell us about HP Discover. What's of interest to you? Have you been looking at what
HP has been doing with their tools? What's of most importance to you in terms of what they do
with their technology?
Quach: I can tell you how important it is for us. Last year we didn't go to HP Discover. This
year, around eight in my team and the architecture team are here. That shows you how important
it is.
Now we spread out. A lot of my team members went into tools and everything else that HP has to
offer, and HP has a lot of offer. We went to the cloud as well as big data, so it all works together.
That’s why it was important for us to come here. ITSM is the main reason we're here, but I want
to make sure that everything works together, because the processes, touch everything.
Gardner: I've talked to a number of organizations, Trung, and they've mentioned that before
they feel comfortable moving into more cloud activities, before they feel comfortable adopting
big data, analytics platforms, they want to make sure they have everything else in order. So
ITSM is an important step for them to then go to larger, more complex undertakings. Is that your
philosophy as well?
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Quach: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You use that technology to force yourself to be
disciplined, or you discipline yourself. ITSM is one way to do it. You force yourself to work in a
certain manner, a streamlined manner, and then you can go into the cloud. It's easier that way.
Gardner: Then, of course, you also have standardization in culture, in organization, not just
technology, but the people and the process, and that can be very powerful.
Quach: If asked me about cloud -- and I have done this with another company -- in a 30-minute
interview about cloud, I would use 29 minutes to talk about technology, people, and process.
Gardner: How about the future of IT? Any thoughts about or the big picture of where
technology is going? Even as we face larger data volumes, perhaps more complexity, and mobile
applications, what are your thoughts about how we solve some of those issues in the big picture?

4. Time to market
Quach: IT more and more is going to have a challenge for time to market. But to do that you
need processes, technology, and of course, people. So the client, the business, is going to ask us
to be faster. That’s why we'll need to go in that cloud. But to go in the cloud, we need to master
our science and then go in the cloud. If not, it would be like not going to the cloud and not
having that agility. We will not be competitive.
Gardner: Looking back, now that you have gone through an ITSM activity, for those who are
just beginning, what are some thoughts that you would share with them, so they don't make the
same mistakes perhaps?
Quach: In an ITSM project, it's very hard to manage the change. I'm talking about the people
change, not the change-management process. Most of the time, you put it in place and say that
everybody has to work with it. If I would redo it, I would bring more people to understand the
ITSM science and why in 5 year or 10 years, it's going to help us.
After that, we'll put the project, but we'll follow them and train them every year. ITSM is a
never-ending story. You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your
client or partner. You need to coach them, to make sure they understand why they're doing this.
Sometimes it’s a bit longer at the beginning, but it’s all worth it at the end.
Gardner: Thanks so much. We’ll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how
Desjardins Group in Montréal has been embarking on an ITSM journey and we've been learning
how that's helped them improve their quality and reduced incidence of IT problems. So thank
you to our guest Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins Group.
Quach: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And thank you too to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion
coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Gain better control over help desk quality and impact.
Learn how to make your help desk more relevant
with a free white paper.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP

5. Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is
using ITSM to put best practivces in place and deliver value to the company. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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