Emirates National Oil Company

* 2 000 help desk calls per month; 10% still open after two days
* Complex and wide-ranging licence agreements required extra management
* Understanding IT analytics required a manual, labour-intensive approach
* No IT service catalogue
* All aspects of IT service management were manual: change management, tracking of desktop licences, report generation, access request, and inventory management

* 4 000 enquiries each month; only 1% remained open after two days
* Significant saving in identifying redundant licences
* Put critical business intelligence at users' fingertips, allowing them to understand key business services metrics
* Published an IT service catalogue and self-service for more than 1 500 staff
* Made customer support, change, asset, and request management a seamless, integrated process

The goal was clear. Dubai's national oil company needed ITIL-aligned service management processes to help propel its business service management (BSM) strategy.

Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) needed to tackle its largely manual service management processes, reduce complexity, and make ENOC's customer support, change, asset, and request management a seamless, integrated process. By standardising on BMC Remedy IT Service Management technologies and Quintica Middle East to support the rollout, ENOC is benefiting from comprehensive policy automation.

The 4 000 monthly enquiries that the three help desk staff manage are paperless. And there are significant potential savings to be made in redundant licence costs. By moving to BSM, ENOC has a comprehensive and unified platform for running its IT, reducing costs and improving the quality of service.

ENOC is a multi-interest oil and gas group with operations in Dubai and Northern Emirates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The company's core business is the development of upstream and downstream oil and gas activities; however, its interests stretch well beyond the petroleum sector, from information technology, to chemical storage and blending.

The one word that best summarises how ENOC used to approach IT service management is 'manual'. The company relied on manual change management processes, manual tracking of desktop licences, manual report generation, manual access request, and manual inventory management. But the company's service management problems went much deeper than a simple over-reliance on labour-intensive processes. There was no means of categorising calls; it was not possible to track compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) agreed with the business; and the WonderDesk help desk software solution, which was used to log incidents,lacked an escalation capability or SLA monitoring and reporting. “ENOC was person dependent, not process dependent,” explains Sina Khoory, CIO, ENOC. “Our aim, therefore, was to move to an integrated, automated service management environment which offered improved compliance with ITIL standards.”

The project deliverables for this new environment read like a shopping list for automated IT service management; each deliverable geared to reducing complexity and making ENOC's customer support, change, asset, and request management a seamless, integrated process. The company wanted to eliminate paper-based approvals, facilitate 24x7 support, and effectively control the change environment. Simultaneously, ENOC was looking to track and adhere to SLA compliance, while automating SLA performance reporting and other metrics, such as licence usage, assets inventory, and call volumes. There also needed to be regular tracking of customer feedback and licence metering for regulatory compliance and optimal usage of systems.

ENOC reviewed an assortment of vendors, including BMC Software, IBM Tivoli, Symantec Altiris, LANdesk, and HP. Following a round of presentations, two vendors were short listed: BMC Software and HP. The former was ultimately selected. “We chose BMC Software because it is recognised as the best solution in the market,” says Khoory. “We enjoy an excellent high level relationship both with BMC and their implementation partner, Quintica Middle East. The blend of product quality, professionalism, and local technical knowledge and expertise gave BMC and Quintica the edge in the negotiations.”

Other factors influenced the decision. ENOC is a diversified manufacturer and the IT division provides shared services to a multitude of different lines of business; ranging from bottled and industrial liquefied natural gas, to oil refining, and a network of 180 retail business petrol stations. Altogether, the IT department has standard SLAs with up to 33 legal ENOC entities and 2 000 end-users who reach from the UAE, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti. “In this vast, diverse, and complex infrastructure, BMC Remedy IT Service Management gives ENOC excellent service level management, a robust and flexible workflow engine, and a world-class CMDB,” he says.

The implementation of BMC Remedy IT Service Management, which was executed by Quintica Middle East, took approximately four months to complete. It began with foundation data collection, followed by the service management solution design, build, and testing. Two months later, the first services of BMC Remedy IT Service Management; Change Management, Incident Management, and Problem Management;went live in production. Following this, open calls were migrated from the WonderDesk system to BMC Remedy Service Desk, with a phased implementation to head office staff and the retail business. Quintica then conducted user acceptance testing of the ITSM modules and deployed the client automation modules, BMC Configuration Automation for Clients, and the CMDB.

“Integration and automation were the two watchwords throughout this implementation,” says Khoory. “For example, we integrated BMC Remedy Service Desk with our Ericsson PABX and call center IVR platform. This means an incident is automatically created, without the helpdesk staff needing to re-input any of the information. Overall, Quintica was instrumental in achieving a very smooth transition of the helpdesk from WonderDesk to BMC Remedy Service Desk, together with seamless integration with Oracle HR, Oracle Financials, HP OpenView, our IVR platform, and other systems.”

The Dubai-based team has special mention for BMC Analytics for BSM, which puts critical business intelligence at their fingertips and allows them to understand key business services metrics. For example, Khoory and his team can measure how adept IT is at supporting ENOC's business service objectives and SLAs; they can improve how IT assets support critical business services; and they can make better decisions, based on a comprehensive view of how IT impacts the business. “BMC Analytics for BSM is great. We have an SLA meeting every month and the only report on everyone's desk or laptop screen is the BMC analytical report,” says Khoory.

Live for one year, ENOC is benefiting from complete automation of change, release, incident, problem, and knowledge management policies. Help desk services and change requests are paperless; and customer emails are automatically converted to incidents. “We have published an IT Service catalogue and self-service for more than 1 500 ENOC employees and managers receive regular, automated SLA reports on the quality of service they are receiving.”

The help desk is currently supporting up to 4 000 enquiries each month, with only three staff, and the team has recently brought on 10% more users without any increase in help desk staffing levels. “Of the 2 000 calls they used to receive in WonderDesk, 10% of those calls would remain open after two days. With BMC Remedy IT Service Management, we're managing twice the volume of calls and only 1% remain open after that period. Moreover, calling the help desk used to be a democracy; calls were answered in a queue. Now we have the flexibility to introduce a 'VIP list' of key users that we can prioritise and resolve within the SLA.”

Money is being saved too. As a diversified, global company, ENOC has myriad complex and wide-ranging licence agreements to manage. Although Khoory won't be drawn on any official calculations about licence savings, he does say, we spend a substantial amount in licence agreements, and if BMC Asset Management identifies just 10% of these as being redundant, ENOC would realise significant savings in licence costs. That would be a terrific return on investment.”

Khoory has advice for other organisations that may be thinking of a BMC Remedy IT Service Management deployment. “First, establish clearly defined policies and procedures prior to implementation,” he says. “Second, implement the solution in multiple phases and test each handover so it happens when you say it will. Third, aim for continuity of resource deployment: nothing beats having the same team working right throughout the project.”

The ENOC team are not resting on their laurels. They recognise there's more work to be done, from training staff on the ITSM modules, restructuring SLA targets, and designing more task templates, to updating the CMDB, fine tuning the client automation, and conducting the BMC Health Check. “We are on a journey, but we have great partners to travel with,” Khoory concludes. “Both BMC Software and Quintica have been extremely professional throughout this service management project, always reflecting a 'can do' spirit and attitude. We haven't had to refer once to the contract we have with both organisations, which is a good measure of just how successfully we all work together.”