How a 100-year-old company transformed in less than a year to take back control of its IT landscape during a global pandemic
A 100-year-old Swiss company with more than 2000 employees seized an opportunity to take back control of its IT—and lay the foundation for its ambitious digital transformation plans.
Business need
The client, an international group of companies headquartered in Switzerland, designs and sells clothing and apparel.
After a series of acquisitions during the last two decades and an aggressive growth, it became clear that the client scattered IT teams and outdated IT infrastructure just couldn’t cope with the growing demand from the business and the reality of distributed teams in a global company. A new organisation was needed. One with modernised IT infrastructure, streamlined IT service management and a centralised asset management. The organisation needed to do more with less in a very short time to avoid any disruption to the business and support its aggressive growth ambitions.
Our solution to transform and pilot
After a discovery audit, we realised that the change wouldn’t be easy, the client had their internal IT team stretched too thin dealing with day-to-day activities and had come to rely heavily on several external providers. However, we felt that we had an obligation to our client, who relied on us to get out the current status-quo.
For a transformation of this scale to work, we needed the active involvement and buy-in of key actors across the different companies of the group. So, we built a cross-functional team of ITSM experts from Markup Camp and we involved key managers from the client as well as SMEs and managers from all the client’s external providers involved in IT. We then initiated a large-scale transformation program aimed at reinventing the way internal customers experience IT in their daily life.
The program was built on three core pillars:
- The client needed to adopt a structured way to manage its technical support and incident management; and create and launch a centralised ITSM multichannel portal to reach underserved users and streamline and simplify the way customers engage with the IT teams.
- The client needed to map its IT systems landscape and build observability and monitoring to ensure its mission-critical infrastructure and applications were available 24/7/365; and automate incident identification, mitigation and escalation to find and resolve incidents with the least impact to the business possible.
- The client needed to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud while managing and servicing the hybrid IT landscape during the multi-year transition period.
People at the centre of sustainable innovation
We knew that technology and processes were only one part of the transformation equation. Without the right skills and talent in place, no digital solution or methodology—no matter how innovative—would perform to potential or withstand future evolution. Hopefully, the also saw the potential in this partnership to help cultivate skills in-house, strengthening a commitment to building excellence with their own talent.
Over the course of several months, the client created new digital roles, and set up cross-functional agile squads in IT and software departments to catalyse the adoption of new ways of working.
This use case is proof that innovation is not just a buzz-word but a critical success component; and that it pays off when an organization commits to transformation at every level. This digital journey has changed the way the whole organisation works increasing all initiatives time to market; reducing the number of critical incidents; and reducing the overall cost of IT.
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