Executive summary
In only two years, Bank of Ireland has decommissioned 137 applications from its estate leveraging Technology Business Management (TBM), saving €3 million a year in operational run costs. However, cost savings are only part of the story. Their purpose-built TBM system, Apptio, has enabled the company to ingest additional contextual data, enabling them to reduce their risk profile, increase efficiency, and strengthen knowledge and collaboration across the company through a better understanding of its technology estate. They’re exploiting their data to achieve a broader spectrum of value beyond the fundamentals.
Company overview
Bank of Ireland is a relationship-driven retail and commercial bank with over 8,000 employees. It is the largest bank in Ireland and one of two pillar banks in the country. Headquartered in Dublin, Bank of Ireland represents approximately 35% of the Irish banking landscape, making the organization strategically important to the overall Irish economy.
The broader value of data
Bank of Ireland began its TBM journey in 2021. Since that time, the company has used it to achieve many impressive outcomes, including reducing legacy applications, increasing application ownership awareness of the cost-performance of their tech stack, lowering technology costs, and gaining more control over the company’s technology estate.
“Most people understand the value of TBM and how the approach helps you control cost,” said Ronan Hughes, Bank of Ireland’s principal architect for Core Banking and Group Manufacturing. “That’s the main reason most people deploy the taxonomy in their organization, and it works admirably for that.”
According to Hughes, they weren’t surprised when TBM helped them better understand the total cost of ownership and find areas where they could save money. What was unexpected, however, was the value the company received from the underlying contextual data.
Applying the TBM taxonomy and drilling down to a granular level of detail helped Bank of Ireland’s IT group increase their knowledge of older, less frequented parts of the company’s technology estate, increase cost awareness of leadership and staff, and identify currency gaps (outdated, off maintenance, or end of life hardware and software) that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
“When we implemented TBM, we learned so much about our estate, about our applications, about our lines of business, and how they overlap the technology between them,” Hughes said. “This gave us a wealth of information, and we began to look at the concept of exploiting the metadata to drive even more value. One area in particular was our risk agenda.”
Reducing operational risk
Like many other long-serving banking institutions, Bank of Ireland’s technology estate is mature, with a mixture of legacy systems, emerging technologies, and modern applications. This requires the IT organization to stay current on new and older technology and ensure systems are up to date and reflect today’s business requirements. According to Hughes, this is one area where exploiting metadata has really helped the company.
“When you understand cost at a granular level to where you have identified individual server calls to applications mapped to particular domains or business products, then you have a much deeper view of what’s actually on your estate and anything that might not be current or approaching end of life,” he said. “For example, we discovered a lot of systems running Windows 2016. It would be off maintenance within the next 12 months. Considering the size of our estate, it was going to take more than a year of work to make sure everything was upgraded correctly. This data gave us the evidence we needed to show that this project should be a high priority and kick-off immediately to avoid a risk to the business.”
In addition to identifying vulnerabilities with older hardware and software, Apptio helped the bank uncover risks in their recovery processes. The bank maintains a knowledge repository on all its systems that contains key information about outages and recovery actions, including legacy systems dating back over 25 years. When the company deployed TBM, the team discovered some of the recovery plans were outdated, having been written in the late 1990s, and did not reflect changes in the business, such as online banking, 24/7 availability, real-time payments, and other services that did not exist thirty years ago.
“If we had followed those recovery actions,” Hughes said, “we would have potentially caused greater damage to our systems. Bringing this to our attention was an unexpected benefit of TBM and our purpose-built system working with extended contextual data sets.”
Another example, Hughes said, centered around a custom application the bank had built to run on an older, proprietary platform. “By applying the taxonomy and existing TCO to our analysis of a cost/value scenario, we were able to show that an upgrade to a newer operating system and newer infrastructure and storage would effectively close off the existing operational risk we had in that system and give us a few extra years to decide what we wanted to do with that platform going forward,” he said.
To improve support, Bank of Ireland consolidated all knowledge repositories into ServiceNow, the company’s platform for IT service management, so everyone who has application support duties can easily search for and find information. They also amended their process so that recovery plans were reviewed with the application operations team and updated, if necessary, before being moved to ServiceNow. This helped them improve their operations and reduce risk. Additionally, the partnership between Apptio and ServiceNow is critical to the team because the bi-directional flow of data and interconnectedness allows the costs to be modeled based on consumptive, data-driven relationships, creating a single source of truth for costing data and a defensible total cost of ownership for their applications.
“These benefits,” Hughes said, “were not the reason we deployed TBM — we deployed TBM to reduce costs and demonstrate defensible control of our cost base. But because of TBM, we now have tangible improvements to how we deploy change, how we understand our estate, how we negotiate with vendors, and how we increase knowledge across the board, which is not what we expected when we first deployed.”
Benefits available to anyone
Hughes shared that TBM has helped Bank of Ireland reduce costs. Since deploying the methodology two years ago, the bank has decommissioned 137 applications from its estate, saving €3 million a year in operational run costs, with another 60 applications to be decommissioned soon.
The additional benefits — the non-monetized benefits — such as reducing risk, improving recovery capability, increasing knowledge and accountability of staff, and others, were unexpected but equally valuable, according to Hughes, and not just limited to their IT operation. “These benefits are available to anyone who employs TBM,” he said.
In terms of advice for others who may be considering implementing TBM, Hughes said, “Collaboration across the company is a huge element of making this work. Stay close to your infrastructure team because they know where all the older technology is and need to support identification of savings opportunities. Stay close to your procurement team for insight on automatic renewal of licenses. Engage the risk people so you understand the areas with the highest level of operational risk, and then look to see if there are any technology elements within those areas you can target to reduce risk. Stay close to your application and platform teams so that they can benefit from the knowledge of consumption and cost drivers. Finally, work hand in hand with whatever platform you use for your CMDB because that is the view of the truth everyone looks to for the deployed estate and related relationships. The more unified you are with that, the better because it can immediately reflect changes and show the cost and improvements you’ve deployed as you go on your journey.”
IBM Apptio
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