Creating a global standard for IT knowledge, service, and execution

February 2, 2010 Features

As the world’s largest privately held commercial real estate firm, Cushman & Wakefield recognises the need to create a consolidated service desk. However, five years ago, the situation was very different. As Steve Kennedy, associate director of Cushman & Wakefield recalls.

“The IT service desk was little more than a basic call-logging system, and, even then, only 30 percent of calls in the UK were actually recorded,” remembers Steve Kennedy, associate director of Cushman & Wakefield. “Outside the UK, there was no way of capturing calls at all.” In order to make the service desk more effective, Cushman & Wakefield introduced standardised and repeatable processes based on ITIL best practice principles, to provide IT support to 2,000 users across Europe and demonstrate the true value of IT to the global business. For Kennedy, developing and running a robust infrastructure and IT service delivery model are crucial to supporting the company’s overall business.

The company was in the midst of restructuring its IT department to reduce unplanned system outages. The IT service management team took the opportunity to introduce a best practice approach to IT based on ITIL principles. As a commercial property firm, Cushman & Wakefield prides itself on delivering a consistent level of service to its clients around the world – why could this not apply to the delivery of IT services to employees?

“When I joined Cushman & Wakefield, I wanted to create a best practice IT framework focused on delivering tangible benefits to the organisation rather than a set of ITIL processes for ITIL’s sake,” says Kennedy. “We soon developed a series of structured, repeatable processes that were easy to roll out across Europe and could demonstrate a clear path of escalation, total ownership and accountability of the IT department.”

Together with the IT service management team and his group of 10 analysts, Kennedy has created a pan-European service desk, based not only on ITIL guidelines, but also on the LANDesk ITBM suite, a desktop application designed to provide IT and business support to employees, customers and public citizens. The suite enables Cushman & Wakefield to cater for the IT support needs of employees across EMEA in a coherent, structured and proactive way. The team manages a centralised IT infrastructure comprising both fixed and mobile assets and has a small number of dedicated IT experts in each country, all working from the same system.

Now, Cushman & Wakefield’s pan-European service desk handles around 2,000 IT calls per month, mainly administrative enquiries relating to password reset and file access as well as requests for new equipment and video-conferencing set-ups. This is a huge improvement from five years ago because the new system has enabled the service desk to grow to far more than a basic call-logging system, and enables a pan-European service.

By upgrading the original HelpDesk system to the ITBM suite and combining ITIL-verified principles with this suite, Cushman & Wakefield can now demonstrate impact analysis, facilitate speedy resolution of problems and provide timely and automated communication of progress to IT users. This has dramatically enhanced customer interaction, increased greater end-user confidence in the IT service desk and its accountability to the organisation.

Cushman & Wakefield continues to consider ways of maximising the IT service desk such as automating the interaction between their monitoring solution, Solar Winds, and the ITBM software so that updates and closures are synchronised between the two systems.

However, the number one priority is duplicating the success of the pan-European service desk on a global scale. Cushman & Wakefield’s US operation has also installed the ITBM suite but it is currently run independently and managed on an outsourced basis. The plan is to integrate the EMEA service desk with the USA and Asia to create one consolidated, seamless service desk operation.

Steve Kennedy has ambitious plans for the future. Just as the corporation draws upon its full-service platform to help clients meet near-term challenges and maximise long-term value, Steve hopes to replicate this sentiment in the company’s approach to IT.

“When I started, it was an exciting time. LANDesk ITBM had been installed and it gave us the ideal framework to define and create a whole new set of processes that could be rolled out across EMEA,” explains Kennedy. “Since then, you could say that the UK has been a very successful pilot scheme, so successful in fact that we want to share that success with every part of Cushman & Wakefield. My ultimate aim is to have one fully integrated global service desk that delivers employees worldwide first-class IT support. And, from the positive feedback my team has received so far – we must be doing something right!”