HP Mission Critical Partnership

Convert: (laughs) You’re right, if you want to completely avoid risk, you should never change anything on your system – if it’s working, that is. However, change is an everyday part of IT. In fact, change is a key element of successful IT, but not only IT, but in business needs as well.

? So IT people have to constantly make changes to their systems, increasing the risk of failure. But what if failure is simply not an option?

Convert: Our object is to help the customer ensure that there is no down time at all. Simply none. You can think of this as the top-end offering within our Mission Critical Support service portfolio, which also offers things like Proactive 24 Service and Critical Service. These are comparable to what other vendors offer their customers. HP’s Mission Critical Partnership, out top-of-the-line offering to customers, is something that plays in a class of its own. It’s more about what value customers attaches to IT as a central element of their competitiveness. It’s about how much would an hour of downtime cost you? And its about making sure your IT team has the right level of knowledge and expertise to make sure the system will run 24 by 365, even if they have to make changes.

? How can you seriously promise your customers zero downtime?

Scheel: You can’t put a number against an environmental service. Most of the issues we deal with here are not technical at all. They can be administrative or organizational. It can be the coffee cup someone spills into a server, or it can be a cleaning woman unplugging power. This is not just something I’m dreaming up, it actually happens! These things can cause, say, airplanes to crash. I’m not joking, it can happen like that. Mission Critical Partnership means that we look at all possible causes of downtime and try to prevent them from happening.

? Just how close is this partnership? Do you actually have people from HP living and working with the customer?

Scheel: The customer gets a very intense relationship with HP. He gets a number of people who are more or less physically assigned to them and who are responsible for ensuring that nothing goes wrong. The most extreme form is a dedicated account support manager the customer can call at three o’clock in the morning, on weekends, anytime. My analogy to this is British Airways’ fast lane at Heathrow airport, where you get whisked past the lines through security. In other words, mission critical partners of HP do not wait in queues for the next available agent. You are a very important customer with a very tight relationship to HP.

? But how do you stop incidents from happening in the first place?

Scheel: We have to make sure the customer follows a structured process when he touches his system. For that we have a programme we call Continual Service Improvement. Here we look at all the customer’s processes that may cause downtime. We make sure that changes that are made are tracked, approved, scheduled, documented and validated properly What we don’t want to happen is for the system to go down because of changes which we are unaware of. In that case we might be fixing the wrong problem.

? So actually you’re doing a diagnosis of the customer’s business, aren’t you?

Convert: First of all we do an ITSM assessment that analyses 24 different areas that every company should address in order to properly manage their IT environments. In reality, they rarely do. The assessment will reveal what’s broken, and some of it may be badly broken. There are often no processes, no guidelines, they aren’t following best practices, documentation is patchy or nonexistent. This is then turned over to the people at HP responsible for creating a so-called service improvement plan. Then we look up our vast library of best practices to determine what the customer actually should be doing but isn’t. Continual service improvement goes very, very deep. There are well over 1,000 items in our library that should be checked, and fixed if necessary. Once we have done the assessment the account support team and the customer sit down and decide together what priorities to assign.

? Given that IT budgets are growing tighter all the time, who do you sell this kind of service to your customers’ top management?

Convert: I think for these customers there are certainly other issues that are more important then costs. They want to better align business and IT. They want to insure extremely high availability in order to protect their business. And they want to continue to improve the level of IT service they can offer to their users both within the company and outside. Our Mission Critical Partnership helps them address all of these challenges in a meaningful way.