Incidents, changes: iTop at the core of the IT department
SEB’s previous ticketing tool had reached its limits. Before replacing it, the group ran a thorough market review.
“We compared several solutions, including ServiceNow, GLPI and iTop,” says Jérémy Genty. “Each was assessed against what the IT department actually needed, the budget available and how far it could grow with us. iTop was chosen for its flexibility and its capacity to evolve.”
The platform is used to track and monitor infrastructure issues, and also every application connected to the group’s products. “Managing incidents and service requests has become far simpler. A user portal with a service catalogue lets employees submit requests easily, a feature that has stopped working in an app, a problem with hardware. Requests can also arrive by email and be re-triaged by our IT team.”
Change management is the other substantial part of the deployment. “Reporting runs in Metabase, which makes change advisory boards straightforward to run and gives us detailed follow-up.” The iTop CMDB links every change and every ticket to specific assets, which gives a clear overall view of the IT estate. “That genuinely helps with change management, because you can see the potential impacts up front.”
A strategic instance dedicated to finance
Deploying iTop in the IT department made it possible to standardise the group’s finance processes, which until then had run largely by email, with no visibility and no record of what had been asked or answered.
To fix that, SEB set up four shared service centres to handle requests from the business: in France, Poland, China and Colombia.
“We deployed a dedicated iTop instance to manage those requests, from general accounting to accounts payable and master data management,” Jérémy Genty explains. “Instead of an email with a vague description, local finance teams now use a ticketing system with defined forms. Communication between every entity in the group is standardised and clear.”
The finance teams were trained before go-live. “We walked through the processes and the features, demonstrated the tool, and wrote a user guide for them to keep.”
One further benefit: “iTop lets us set up approvals on certain requests, which adds a layer of control and validation. Teams can also see the backlog of requests waiting, which helps them prioritise and manage their work.”
Still developing
The CMDB is where SEB sees most room to grow. “The tool is in place, but we can push our knowledge and our skills further. We want to go deeper, to be far more operational in how we handle and understand the infrastructure,” says Jérémy Genty.
The group is also working to standardise and extend its service catalogue. “Our goal is to stop requests arriving by email. Re-triaging them takes far too much of the teams’ time.”