JLT adopts netEvidence’s Highlight to improve employees’ experience of vital IT services

Highlight monitors and reports on how key services are performing, in real-time, between JLT’s main UK offices, its farm of Citrix servers and its data centres. It provides clear indicators on the experience of consumers with traffic light colours to identify if any service is underperforming and where. This could be the Citrix desktop tools for email and file sharing through to VoIP which is vital in the call centre. Applications that form part of a service, including accounting and payroll are also monitored. JLT will soon extend Highlight to monitor multiple offices in cities across 24 countries.

Ian Cohen, Group CIO at JLT says, “The issues we wanted to address were about that essential ‘experience’ of IT services; something quite different to how an IT team traditionally measures its own performance.

“For example, our current outsourcing experience, like many that are focussed on infrastructure and infrastructure services, comes with a certain lack of transparency. It’s not that our sourcing provider isn’t being transparent; they actually try hard to be as open as possible. However, sourcing contracts are geared around physical measures like server up time, capacity and performance which provide only half the picture; it says nothing about your colleagues’ experience of the service itself.”
Chris Hunter, Group Services Delivery Director who manages JLT’s global IT services adds, “Of the solutions we saw, Highlight offered the most flexibility and gave us the greatest insight both in real-time and historically. With Highlight, we are able to put ourselves in the seat of our colleagues and see our services through their eyes. The key was that we worked closely with our outsourcing service provider - we didn’t want them to feel threatened but rather embrace and augment the service we deliver to our colleagues.”

Now if someone at JLT can’t do something, the IT team can see clearly where the issue occurred and what other elements were involved. If a key service, is underperforming, Highlight informs the team of the problem and where in their infrastructure the issue exists – network link or device, server, or application. They know which users are impacted, the level of impact, and which team should be working towards resolution.

Chris Hunter adds, “When a colleague calls the service desk with a problem saying ‘it’s broke’ – we have access to detailed information to improve the quality of that interaction and we can have a far better informed conversation. Highlight’s visualisation is good, the set up was easy and we are really happy with it. We particularly like that it is a Software-as-a-Service model. We will now refine it as we move forward with more locations.”