Morrison outsource IT operation
When leading repairs and maintenance services provider, Morrison, decided to outsource its IT as part of a review of its business strategy, it chose ISC for being flexible, responsive and able to deliver against current and future growth plans.
Client
Morrison’s core business is the repair and maintenance of social housing, with over 3,000 employees looking after 400,000 homes across the UK. Public and private organisations contract Morrison to manage and maintain their own and residents’ buildings, with Morrison undertaking joinery, plastering, decorating, plumbing, gas installation and electrical work.
Business driver
When the company wins a new contract, it needs to mobilise quickly to open a local office with a resilient IT infrastructure in place. This, coupled with the desire to increase its operational profit by reducing overheads and the need to improve its IT companywide, led Morrison to consider outsourcing desktop, hosting and network services.
Chief Information Officer, Ian Bryce, explains: “We conducted a review of our business and we identified a number of drivers for improvement. We needed to integrate our business as we had four different domains running with different versions of back office applications, which meant duplications in patching and inconsistent standards. IT resourcing was also a challenge. We were heavily reliant on key individuals within regions and yet had gaps of resource in other localities and we had problems with downtime. Auditors were also highlighting IT as an area of weakness.”
Morrison decided to outsource the operation of its IT infrastructure and focus on the development of business specific applications. Although one of its small business units had already outsourced IT to one of the large providers, it decided to look for an alternative service provider better suited to its needs. It embarked on a thorough supplier assessment, inviting six companies to bid for the contract.
Solution
The brief was simple enough. The winning company had to represent good value for money and have a strong technical and commercial team. It needed to demonstrate competency in the area of outsourcing and it had to be big enough to deliver the contract, but equally, it also needed to work with Morrison and understand its constraints.
“The idea was that if we had a problem, our MD could look in the whites of the eyes of our supplier’s MD – that our business wouldn’t be a drop in the ocean of a huge IT supplier. If I’m honest, ISC weren’t the favourite to win the project at the outset, but they more than proved themselves during the tender process and continue to do so,” explains Ian Bryce.
The project had three phases. The first was the creation of an effective IT support model with a central service desk, to resolve user issues, remote server management and the TUPE transfer of the relevant employees. The second phase was to introduce a single e-mail domain and remove legacy infrastructure.
The third and final phase of the project was the most difficult but also the most rewarding as this is where Morrison was going to reduce its operating costs.
This phase would decommission Morrison’s regional server rooms and transfer all servers to a central data centre hosted and managed by ISC. This facilitated the transition to a single instance of all applications and back office solutions. Morrison also deployed Citrix® application delivery technology to enable centralised management and anywhere access to applications, and implemented a NetApp storage area network to improve data management and security.
Benefits
“No one’s going to believe that the project was completely problem-free, but there was no finger pointing with ISC. They looked at how the problem affected us and our timeframes and said ‘right, this is what we need to do to get back on track’. Even now, they listen to any concerns, take notes and then come back with a solution,” explains Ian Bryce.
“We’ve improved business continuity and resilience and I don’t have to worry about getting communication systems in place or boxes on desks. I know that when we win more contracts, that with ISC we have the resources to deliver. They’ve removed the issue of reliance on key individuals and I know what’s going on with each site. Everything works really well.”
“We’ve had a step change in our IT security and in our data management and retrieval, and I don’t say that lightly. I look at what we’ve got now and we’re a million miles away from where we were before, all with a net reduction in operational costs of £300,000 a year. There were a number of options open to Morrison at the beginning of this project and if I were to start again I would have no hesitation of following the same route,” concludes Ian Bryce.