Regaining control and transparency in an outsourced environment
DNB is one of the leading financial institutions of the Nordic region. It is Norway’s largest bank by a wide margin and it is a substantial player in the insurance and real estate sector as well. A couple of years ago a group of top people from its IT department began to look for new ways to create transparency between IT operations and costs. Enter SMT Data.
Create management insight into cost driver relations between IT usage and realization of business objectives
Facilitate savings through optimization across IT-platforms
Lack of transparency and control in an outsourced environment
Action
Create daily updated, independent, trustworthy and flexible reporting and analysis on capacity, performance, and cost in an outsourced environment
Result
Significant initial savings realized in the mainframe environment
Budgeted 15% capacity growth YoY for 3 years was kept flat
Understands who uses what, when, how much and at what cost
With approx. 13,600 fulltime employees, DNB is Norway’s largest financial services group and one of the largest in the Nordic region in terms of market capitalization. The Group is among the world’s leading banks within shipping, energy and seafood. The Group offers a full range of financial services, including loans, savings, advisory services, insurance and pension products for retail and corporate customers and the public sector.
Summary
Olav Kvale and Bjørn Paulsrud are the tandem at the helm of DNB IT Services and they are always on the look-out for more efficient ways to face the challenge of providing the management with crucial information and insights into how various applications drive costs. When they learned about IT Business Intelligence from SMT Data the information they received was so consistent with the parameters they worked within that they scarcely hesitated to enter into concrete negotiations. It’s early summer on the outskirts of Oslo where we sit down with Olav and Bjørn and Owe Østrem, Norwegian Country Manager for SMT Data, in DNB’s IT headquarters to hear the story.
Olav Kvale remembers: ”With all of our service production out-sourced to EVRY, we need to be certain that everything we receive is as efficient and optimized as possible. That means having in place active control measures to ensure that what we receive is on par with the best of what’s available in the market. So when our finance controller Gjermund Sælensminde came and described what SMT Data had to offer, we immediately realized that it could represent great value for DNB. He said, ’we need to know who uses what, when and how much. And this ITBI thing seems to be able to tell us that’.”
Bjørn Paulsrud: ”It all boils down to us needing to be able to control costs. That requires us to be able to exhaustively track fluctuations and variations in the operational flow.
We used to rely on reports that were both historical and static, but IT Business Intelligence is so much closer to real-time tracking and insight. It is extremely dynamic and adaptable to our specific needs.”
