About our Service Delivery Organisation … People, Processes, Systems
At Dimension Data, we are serious about services. Over the years we crafted an approach to service delivery that allows us to accurately, flexibly and reliably meet the needs of your business. The cornerstones of our service delivery organisation are our people, our processes and our systems. These three entities work in concert to deliver a consistent quality of service to local, regional and global clients and enable us to provide an identical service experience across all geographies.
A Single Point of Contact, Local Language Support … Around the Clock.
How does Dimension Data go about delivering its services to you? The answer is through our five strategically-placed Global Service Centres, located in Boston, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Melbourne and Johannesburg. These centres provide local language support for Dimension Data’s support and managed service offerings on a 24x7x365 basis.
How does it all work? Firstly, we employ highly trained professionals, who specialise in technical service delivery. They provide a single point of contact, ensuring all incidents are quickly and professionally managed, through to resolution. Two-thirds of Dimension Data’s employees form our technical team of which more than 80% hold a Cisco qualification. Our Global Service Centres also boast some 200 ITIL trained specialists and over 50 Microsoft engineers.
Secondly, within our centres we embrace global best practice processes as defined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3, so that you benefit from the same high quality of service wherever you are in the world.
Finally, through information sharing, pro-active monitoring and flexible reporting our Global Services Operating Architecture ensures that we meet the stringent Service Level Agreements set by our clients.
This winning combination of people, processes and systems enables us to deliver a consistent, best-in-class quality of service to our local, regional and global clients alike. In total our five Global Service Centres receive approximately 900,000 service requests from almost 10,000 clients every year… in other words we resolve in excess of 2500 incidents every day!
A Global Best-Practice Approach
Dimension Data embraces global best practice throughout its business. From an IT Service Management perspective, we have chosen to model our processes on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3.
Introduced in the late 1980s, ITIL is now regarded as best practice for IT Service Management across the globe. It’s a framework which provides structure by modelling the goals, general activities, inputs and outputs of the processes involved in service provision. Today, best-of-breed IT departments and service providers are opting to adapt processes to mirror ITIL V3 guidelines, thereby guaranteeing high quality service which is delivered in a consistent and repeatable manner.
ITIL processes are defined across Dimension Data and deployed consistently, giving you peace of mind that you will receive a consistent service experience – wherever you are based. Furthermore, our working procedures have been directly derived from our processes and include local specificities. This means we are able to meet your requirements, regardless of your organisation’s geography and culture.
In order to ensure ongoing improvement in the implementation of our processes, we undertake regular internal maturity assessments and process compliance audits in each of our Global Service Centres.
Our Next Generation Service Management System
The backbone of Dimension Data’s service management system is our Global Services Operating Architecture (GSOA), the mechanism that automates efficient and consistent worldwide service delivery. Introduced globally in 2000, the GSOA is an architecture of computer systems, applications and business processes that we use to manage and deliver our global services. Through information sharing, proactive monitoring and flexible reporting, the GSOA enables us to meet our stringent Service Level Agreements with our clients.
In line with our mantra of continuous improvement, we make ongoing investments to our service management system. We recently embarked on a three-year programme to evolve and enhance our existing GSOA platform. The investment supports Dimension Data’s ongoing commitment to provide clients with a world-class service experience. In addition, we want to retain our reputation as a world-leader in managed services provision.
So what benefits does our enhanced platform ‘GSOA 2.0’ offer to our clients? One of its key features is a modern Services Portal, with real-time service dashboards, self-service and enhanced integration capabilities. Multi-national clients benefit from consistent service delivery, managed through the new portal and implemented through the adoption of global ITIL V3 processes. Flexibility is one of the cornerstones of the new functionality – we’re able to localise and customise our workflow across various geographies, which in turn enables us to respond to clients’ changing requirements and technology needs with increased agility.
The GSOA 2.0 platform also operates off Software as a Service (SaaS) technology. It’s no secret that SaaS is one of the most impactful trends in the IT software space and more recently; this trend has been extended into the IT Service Management (ITSM) domain. This approach alleviates many of the traditional installation issues such as large upfront license fees, lengthy implementation times, and difficult access by the mobile force. It provides a lightweight, yet very comprehensive approach to IT service and asset management, and has the potential to save time and cost, as well as address frustrations associated with more traditional service delivery models.