InsightETE Success Story - AEP

AEP's goals for the reorganization of their IT department were simple:

Enhance the business value that IT provides to business ends
Align IT efforts with business strategies
Ensure that IT can help shape business strategies

With 18 business units to serve, AEP looked to insightete for assistance in creating a new Service Level Management process for its IT department. They needed a system that was understandable to both the IT department and the business units.

InsightETE worked closely with both business units and IT, and developed a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that was acceptable and understandable to both parties within a few weeks.

Next was the real challenge. InsightETE began installing the measurement and performance reporting tools that would make the SLA stick. It was determined that the most critical services provided by AEP's IT department were mainframe availability and response time. InsightETE began work on a custom solution with these needs in mind.

The first phase was to install software "agents" in strategic areas of AEP's IT infrastructure, creating a system that would automatically report service interruptions. Next, InsightETE developed a means of examining this data to determine these interruptions.

The system measured performance over the entire path of a transaction - from the user's PC to the mainframe and back. This gave IT personnel performance statistics from the user's point of view. They got a report of the availability of the entire system - not just pieces of it. And if a transaction failed, they could see exactly where the failure occurred.

In the end, IT had a tool that allowed them to quickly pinpoint and eliminate problems. Business users had a system that gave them facts about how well IT was meeting the terms of the SLA. Now, AEP's IT department and business units are able to work as partners, and focus their combined efforts on meeting the company's business goals.