Customer SuccessCase
Customer StoryStudy
Managing The Business’ Perception of IT
Helping the IT organization demonstrate true service value to the
business and achieving a 43% reduction in incidents in year one
www.gulfnews.com
Country United Arab Emirates
Industry Media
Gulf News is one of the most
influential newspapers in the Middle
East
Key Statistics
..1,000+ users supported
..30 IT Staff
..2,000+ Assets
Key Challenge
..Poor buy-in to IT from the
business and limited ability to
benchmark performance against
peers
Key Strategy
..Focus on processes, plus
establish and measure daily
KPIs through balanced
scorecard approach
Key Benefits/Results
..43% reduction in number
of incidents per week
over first year
..20% increase in the number of
people being supported with
no increase in headcount
..79% of incidents/requests now
closed within SLA timeframes
..89% of problems
successfully closed without
the problem reoccurring
..93% of problem tickets have
‘known causes’ identified
Why assyst from Axios?
..100% ITIL-aligned
..Consultants were attentive
and proactive
..Implementation was
excellent, especially the
training beforehand
Gulf News was founded in 1978 and was acquired in
1984 by Al Nisr Publishing LLC. The newspaper was then
re-launched as a broadsheet a year later. The newspaper
has received numerous awards, including the Asia-Pacific
Award for Best Newspaper Production and last year
winning ten design awards from the Prestigious Society for
News Design for the third year running. The newspaper
has the highest average audited circulation circulation in
the UAE with over 116,000 copies per day.
Challenge – Poor buy-in to IT from the
business and limited ability to benchmark
performance against peers
The Gulf News IT department had been suffering from
poor perception within the wider business. Whether it
was justified or not, even the IT department itself found
it difficult to tell. The team needed to ensure they were
delivering what the business needed and then be able to
better demonstrate this in order to build stronger support
from the business. Additionally, the team set itself the goal
of becoming the Best IT organization in the Middle East
by 2012 with extreme customer satisfaction.
Prior to implementing the solution, performance
management and visibility was limited due to processes
and reporting being manual and managed in Microsoft
Word. Change management was also piecemeal and
primitive.
“We weren’t doing badly before, but we were unable
to benchmark ourselves and demonstrate the value
we were delivering. We needed to address how we
were perceived, and our performance,” said Edward
Capaldi, Head of IT, Gulf News
End users
e ase in n
End users incr
0%
Incidents Incidents
2
lved
in num
D es k Ha e Desk er
ce c
! !
Ser vi
Ser vi
Sta
1 number of users supported
ff
! Year
100%
100%
120%
Hull CityGulf
Council
News
Strategy – Taking a strategic, phased,
ITIL-based approach to demonstrating
value
The goal throughout was to not only minimize disruption
to the business, but also help drive efficiencies. To this
end, the IT organization took a very strategic approach,
initially focusing on ITIL training and process automation,
and starting to measure and track KPIs more effectively.
With this in mind, Gulf News selected Axios as their
ITSM solution partner due to the provider’s 20 year
focus on ITIL and the assyst solution having been built
and evolved around the ITIL framework.
Unnecessary disruption was avoided through a rapid
implementation, in which the Gulf News team went live
with Axios’ assyst software within two months.
One of the first steps was to find the best ITIL-based
ITSM toolset. Gulf News chose assyst. The first phase
of the implementation was Incident Management, which
had previously been the main metric for the business.
By prioritizing services by their importance to the
business, the team has been able to ensure the systems
that are most critical to profitability of the business are
fully available when required, ensuring newspapers
reach the customers by the morning. Citrix, Microsoft
Exchange, SAP and ATEX (the company’s editorial
system) are given the highest priority by the service desk
– any delay can mean the newspaper is delayed in
reaching its customers.
Problem, Release and Change Management were then
to follow. Using Keppner and Trego’s methodology to
identify known causes, the team was able to measurably
improve the success rate for planned changes within
Gulf News.
Using assyst, Gulf News has
um
b halved the number of incidents
er
b in just one year while at the
same time increasing the
Sta
ff
! by more than 20% with no
increase in service desk
57% head count. IT support also
increased from 8am - 12am to
24/7 support.
www.axiossystems.com

Using Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure
service value is achieved
Upon implementing assyst, Gulf News’ IT department
adopted a balanced scorecard approach which compares
targets against actual delivery, based on Service Level
Agreements. Today, the Gulf News IT team measures and
compares metrics on a daily basis.
Monitoring the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and
putting in place a Service Catalog for the 17 strategic
and critical vendors that deliver services to Gulf News is
now a priority. The Catalog will further aid and simplify
Service Level Management, and will improve Financial
Management.
Having a Service Catalog in place and clear SLAs against
which vendors and internal teams can be measured will
help control, manage and demonstrate performance to
the business, with the ultimate goal of continual service
improvement and increased support from the business.
Capaldi said, “Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying
‘what gets measured, gets done’, I firmly agree with
him. We have agreed ten different criteria with the
management team against which IT is measured. We
are confident that with the new processes and systems
we have been putting in place, and the measurement
systems we have established, we will be able to
demonstrate that we are clearly benefiting, and helping
grow the business.”
Forming a central hub for vendor system integrations
Gulf News’ vendors are working with the IT organization
to integrate their systems, so that only one ticket needs
to be raised on Gulf News’ internal system, which then
automatically raises a ticket on the vendors’ systems – the
company sees this as vital to ensuring efficient partnerships
with outsourcing vendors.
This is done by implementing supplier management best
practices and utilizing an assyst event bridge between
Gulf News systems and those of key suppliers.
The company’s Active Directory automatically populates
assyst with user information through the assyst contact
user gateway, which allows Gulf News to limit the
amount of time service desk personnel spend looking
for information, and also provides a single point of
maintenance for all Contact User data, reducing manual
overheads and ensuring data consistency.
Benefits – Supporting 20% more end
users while almost halving the number
of incidents within year one – with the
same staffing levels
Although it is early days, Gulf News has achieved some
significant results.
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The workflow efficiencies and centralized, controlled data
that have been brought about by putting assyst in place
have enabled the IT team to do more with less, providing
support to 20% more users with the same number of
service desk employees, while at the same time reducing
the number of incidents per week by 43% from a year
ago. In fact Ed Capaldi estimates that if they had not
implemented assyst, the company would have needed
to increase headcount in IT by around 10% to manage
the volume.
Having established a formal set of SLAs, the team is
able to demonstrate to the business that more than 79%
of incidents and requests are now closed within SLA
timeframes, and the team is aiming to increase this number
of the coming few months.
More importantly, the assyst system has allowed the Gulf
News IT department to better identify trends and issues
leading to more than 89% of problems being successfully
closed without the problem resurfacing – this is contributing
to the ongoing reduction in the total number of incidents
per week. Additionally more than 93% of problem tickets
have ‘known causes’ identified at the outset.
While the changes still require close management,
there has been a significant increase in the number
of successful, issue-free, changes made in the live
environment, eliminating a great deal of downtime, simply
by establishing formal change management policies and
procedures.
“Prior to implementing the ITSM solution, we were a
typical firefighting department. assyst combined with
the ITIL training allows for setting measurable KPIs
that enable us to focus on providing extreme customer
satisfaction,” commented Edward Capaldi, Head of IT,
Gulf News
Why assyst from Axios? - Scored highest
in selection process
Gulf News assessed a wide range of ITSM providers and
shortlisted two. Axios was chosen over CA due to a number Axios Systems in Media
of factors. All consultants are ITIL qualified, something the and Communication
competition could not claim. In addition, all ITIL processes
are addressed by the single assyst application as opposed Axios has been providing ITSM
to the modular systems competitors were offering, which solutions to the media and
also means the scalability of assyst is almost unlimited. communication industry for
Finally, the 24/7 support Axios is able to provide from its more than 20 years. Our focus
Lebanon office was a great strength. on helping companies deliver
top-line value by managing
effective operations, optimizing
“Axios scored highly with assyst, but it was the
efficiency and driving through
provider’s focus on our processes and their consulting business transformation has been
strength that swayed our decision. We weren’t particularly well demonstrated in
disappointed and the implementation process was the media and communications
excellent, especially the training Axios provided. The sector with clients such as
ongoing assistance provided by the consultants has ITV, BT and Swisscom
been attentive and proactive, always listening to our
needs and requirements,” Capaldi commented.
www.axiossystems.com