Situation

Coming on board in 2022 with a remit of improving the company’s digital systems, CIO McGowan immediately identified multiple issues adversely impacting business as usual. “The basics were there, but challenges included poor visibility across the IT estate, with little in the way of operational performance metrics coming back to the IT leadership team. This resulted in less-than-ideal response times dealing with break/fix issues, and frustration from the business when the systems necessary to support business operations weren’t available or performing appropriately,” he says.

Furthermore, while logistics is an around-the-clock business, support was only available in business hours on Melbourne time. “That made things very difficult for those in our New Zealand operation, as they’re operating two or three hours before Australian operations,” McGowan reports.

He started addressing the shortcomings while attending a forum with the organisation Senior Leadership Team initiating a survey seeking feedback and insights. “This quickly highlighted a lack of responsiveness from the service desk, with wait times of up to 20 plus minutes, and tickets going nowhere with no closure. Many people needing help would simply hang up. This required immediate attention and remediation.”

He adds that, at the time, with the well documented merger between Armaguard & Prosegur Australia on the horizon, the company required a clear vision and strategy for its IT estate, including migrating legacy applications to the cloud and retiring obsolete systems and hardware. “These issues were creating real struggles in terms of our ability to operate our environment in a controlled way. Priority 1 system outages were part and parcel of every day – and the business was all too aware of the impact this has on performance and morale.”

Solution

Appreciating the scale of the challenges exceeded the capacity of the Linfox Armaguard IT team, McGowan knew where to look for help. “I knew Lancom Technology through the transformative work they’d done supporting Barwon Health in its digital transformation,” he relates. “And as they operate across New Zealand and Australia like we do, with an office here in Melbourne, and the necessary AWS architecture and support skills – it felt like a wonderful opportunity to meet the outcomes we had designed.”

The initial focus fell on getting the basics right, including improving the service desk and the flow of metrics to management, establishing 24/7 support – and, even, getting the IP telephony optimised - tasks which Lancom Technology rapidly set about delivering. He stresses the importance of rigour in the basics. “If you don’t know about your problems and the root cause, you can’t fix them. If you don’t know what you have, you can’t stabilise it.”

“After that,” McGowan continues, “We set about creating an architecture, reference model and artifacts, along with an application catalogue. That helps gain a complete understanding of the infrastructure so we could then focus on the areas where migration into the cloud and retirement of legacy applications and infrastructure can take place. We also needed to improve our critical incidence response framework, so we all understood our roles, responsibilities in terms of governance, controls and communications.”

In a parallel exercise, a focus on improving the culture of the IT department including fostering and intimate understanding of the business resulted in evolving the technology function towards ‘solid and secure core systems.’ “Essentially, we were working together creating the capacity for the internal team to face into merger activities, while improving our business as usual.”

Lancom Technology, he says, has delivered a wide range of expertise across AWS and cloud architecture, ITIL service desk alignment, and general IT support augmenting his internal team.

Results

The impact of aligned, reliable and well-supported IT has resulted in building trust between the business and its technology department, says McGowan. “A responsive and stable set of platforms is essential, and in fact, has proven indispensable in the successful execution of a recent merger taken on by our business. Without that, delivering on the merger would have been incredibly challenging.”

Coming back to basics again, he says just having someone respond rapidly and accurately to every service call makes an enormous difference. “We’re down to just on average around 22 seconds now. When our people need help, they get it. Around the clock.”

He’s also optimised his internal IT team secure in the knowledge that Lancom Technology provides appropriate expertise as and when required – such as Azure skills necessary for integrating the systems which came on board via the merger. “We are standardising on AWS, but where it makes sense, some applications remain in Microsoft’s platform. And Lancom has skills across both platforms.”

McGowan also credits Lancom and great partnership with AWS for optimising and rightsizing Linfox Armaguard’s AWS estate, eliminating unnecessary or abandoned instances and services, while fostering a direct relationship with the vendor. “This means both AWS and Lancom are looking at our best interests, preventing cloud costs from blowing out due to creep or inadequate controls.”

What McGowan has also come to appreciate is that with support located in a single provider, there’s a considerable reduction in administrative effort. “But what it really comes down to is good, solid value. Lancom Technology has consistently met every commitment and promise it has made. It’s a solid partnership where they’re here to help us.”