Helping build a platform that will monitor and manage their client’s IT health and Dimension Data’s performance
Helping build a platform that will monitor and manage their client’s IT health and Dimension Data’s performance
Dimension Data uses the power of technology to help organisations achieve great things in the digital era. As a member of the NTT Group, Dimension Data accelerates their clients’ ambitions through digital infrastructure, hybrid cloud, workspaces for tomorrow, and cybersecurity. With a turnover of USD 7.5 billion, offices in 58 countries, and 31,000 employees, Dimension Data has enjoyed strong growth but recognised strong market shifts. Today’s clients want service capabilities that are more relevant to business problems they face every day. They’re seeking a new class of personalised service offerings focused on outcomes.
307% growth in data centre services clients
515% growth in service revenue in 14 months
579% increase in client online engagement
Goals
A new client portal for support premium services in the data centre to increase revenues by 300%. Flexible enough to expand into other service offerings
Provide clients with a window into the health and performance of their technology from both a technical and business perspective and increase client engagement by 150%
Adopt best UX practices to create client relevance, simplify daily tasks, provide consistent UI for data sourced from multiple systems and reduce user incidents (or queries) by 50%
Dimension Data was servicing their customer needs through 8 disparate systems, which created a challenging environment to effectively assess and manage the health of the client’s end-to-end IT business. To support the strategic objective to transform itself from a technology-centric to a client-centric service provider, a unified and seamless portal needed to deliver support and premium services in the data centre and be flexible enough to expand into premium, managed, and enterprise service offerings.
Solution
The project for Manage Centre commenced in late 2014 to support Dimension Data’s plans to expand its services into clients’ data centres. Dimension Data recognised that to be competitive, it required a new client portal. Its existing portal provided clients with a complex, technical interface based on ticketing data and physical infrastructure records. With the advent of cloud solutions and digitalisation, clients’ expectations are evolving: as organisations move from being technology managers to technology consumers, their focus has shifted to business outcomes – they care less about how well their servers are running, or that SAP is slow – they need to know:
Are their business operations running optimally?
Are they maximising revenue while minimising risk?
They want to view IT from a business perspective and they need information about the status and health of their digital environment at any time – available at their fingertips. The Manage Centre project targeted this market shift, using design as a mechanism to modernise their services.
Manage Centre is designed as a browser-based portal for use on tablets, laptops, and PCs. The key to Manage Centre is its ability to visualise current performance and highlight areas requiring a user’s attention, through information design.
The target user personas for Manage Centre are:
Operations staff to request work, track issues, and analyse key performance indicators
IT management to view the overall health and performance of systems and drill-down to the underlying technology information
CxO, business unit management to view quick snapshot of the health and performance of key business functions and the business processes that support them
Monitoring system health
A home screen that is tailored to the different user segments. From managers to engineers, using a traffic light system means that any issues can be flagged at one glance. Four ‘traffic lights’ provide a snapshot of the current health of the client’s IT environment from an infrastructure, IT systems, business process, and business function perspective. Traffic light signposting navigation to alert users to action priority issues quickly and intuitively.
Requesting work
Ability to report issues, request new work, or review all existing issues and work.
Monitoring infrastructure
The relationship between infrastructure supporting IT systems, which are used by business processes to deliver business functions, are visualised in business service maps. These allow to trace the root cause of an issue which may be impacting business via Geo-maps, topology maps and more.
Monitoring hardware
Ability to run real-time and historical trend reports for the health and performance of their technology.
Monitoring inventory
Receive alerts and notifications across the portal, bookmark any view for quick reference and perform key word searches.
Self help
Using forums and the knowledge centre to share information, view posts and seek help.
“Manage Centre was designed as a window into our clients’ technology environments. But it has equally become a window into the way we design, develop, and deliver services as a company. It has shifted our focus from technology-centric to client-centric design and has directly influenced the way we develop new services.
We now see more relevant solutions being developed in a significantly reduced time to market as we apply our learnings from the Manage Centre project.”