Incident response calls at ANZ Banking Group were “chaotic” due to manual processes and the time it took for calls to begin until the bank began to roll out a communications management tool earlier this year.
Speaking at CA Expo 2014 in Sydney this week, ANZ Banking Group global recovery manager Chris Wilkinson told delegates that his team is great at responding to incidents such as system outages but were being let down by some communication processes.
“Service calls could be chaotic because there were lots of people chiming in and asking what’s wrong, what are we doing?” he said.
“We did some analysis of our major incidents and found that sometimes we didn’t get a start [on the call] for 40 minutes. Time is wasted and that’s needless.”
He added that service calls could sometimes last up to four hours.
“Service managers sometimes disrupt the calls and ask what the status [of the incident] is. Generally, our communication across incident management was very manual and haphazard,” said Wilkinson.
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After looking at some tool sets that communicate the status of incidents to people via SMS or email, he chose a cloud-based tool called Xmatters.
“We wanted a cloud offering because we didn’t want to get stuck with another tool within the bank that we would need to look after, after it broke down,” he said.
“The last thing you want during a major issue is your communications tool not working and you can’t get people on to a call bridge.”
Xmatters was also chosen because it integrated with the bank’s CA service desk manager.
ANZ Banking Group security staff now receive SMS and email alerts about incidents. Security staff can also take part in conference calls with other staff within the bank to manage incident response.
By using the communications tool, Wilkinson said it wants to resolve high security incidents within an hour.
“We are here to serve our customers so the less down time, the better.”
He added that it plans to complete the roll out of the tool to 1,400 IT technicians by December 2014.
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