Mercantil Bank

Adopting and adapting

ITIL®

Rosal Urdaneta

Case study
August 2018
Contents
1 Who are Mercantil Bank? 03

2 Adopting and adapting ITIL 04

3 What are your recommended Best Practices? 06

4 About the author 07

5 About AXELOS 08

6 Trade marks and statements 08

02 Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® AXELOS.COM

1. Who are Mercantil Bank?
Mercantil Bank, N.A. is the fourth-largest commercial bank
headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. It has served its
community for over 35 years.

The bank has 22 Banking Centers – 15 located in South Florida

and seven in Houston, Texas, as well as one loan production
office in Manhattan, New York. The bank offers a wide variety of domestic, international, personal and
commercial banking services, including investment, trust, and estate planning through its subsidiaries,
Mercantil Investment Services, Inc. and Mercantil Trust Company, N.A.

1.1 HOW ARE IT AND IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT IMPORTANT TO

THE SUCCESS OF YOUR ORGANIZATION?
IT works hand-in-hand with the business to ensure the bank remains up and running at all times.

As a bank, business interruption is unacceptable, as that means ‘money loss’ as well as possible regulatory
violations. We work together with the business to implement and maintain services for our internal and
external customers.

IT service management (ITSM) has become the solution to many historical issues, including discontent
with IT. One contention was that IT had no statistics or fact-based information that could help us identify
the weaknesses that affected the delivery of services.

The adoption of ITIL was a learning and sharing experience which helped us understand how we could do
better as a department. ITIL allowed us to see that we needed to set an expectation for users with regards
to our response time, etc.

1.2 WHAT SIGNIFICANT ITSM PROJECTS OR PROGRAMMES HAVE

YOU UNDERTAKEN TO IMPROVE WHAT YOUR ORGANIZATION
DOES?
We have adopted incident management, change management, problem management, service level
management, knowledge management and request fulfilment.

AXELOS.COM Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® 03

2. Adopting and adapting ITIL
2.1 WHAT BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL CHALLENGES DID YOU
FACE?
Adopting and adapting ITIL involved a change of company culture, a change that is still evolving.

Previously, everything that came into IT entered through one funnel. There was no distinction between
requests and incidents, which made it difficult to identify how to prioritize our response. At the same time,
we were limited with our ticketing system because our ITSM tool was not ITIL-compliant.

User tickets ended up in a ‘black hole’ once they made it to IT. Consequently, users had no visibility
regarding the status of their ticket.

In addition, we were restricted to just two service level agreements (SLAs): three days for failures and 30
days for requests. This was a problem because, for example, not every request takes 30 days. There was
no prioritization and we ultimately learned the definition of the word ‘backlog’.

2.2 CONFIGURING THE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

DATABASE
Our original configuration management database (CMDB) was created in a Microsoft Access database
updated manually by the Information Security department. There was no interface with IT and, as a
consequence, discrepancies crept in. That meant we listed applications that were no longer used, which
used different names, or had different owners. Two years ago, we decided this situation had to change.

With the acquisition of an ITIL-compliant CMDB tool that works with our other ITIL processes, we are now
able to maintain an updated CMDB which is available to both IT and Info Security. This means we have
full ownership of the information.

2.3 CHANGE MANAGEMENT – BECOMING COHESIVE

Adopting change management in the bank was also very challenging. Previously, changes happened at any
time, which could lead to a server going down without the knowledge of any stakeholder who was using it.

This lack of control over changes made troubleshooting more difficult and less efficient; identifying the root
cause of a problem was based solely on trial and error.

We introduced a Change Advisory Board (CAB) which meets every week to agree on the implementation of
changes. The stakeholders talk to each other before a decision is made and, if users will be affected in any
way, we send out a communication to let them know how they will be affected. Also, certain changes are
now postponed if they conflict with a systems update or on-going maintenance.

We have moved from an approach of ‘what happened?’ to ‘how did it occur?’ We find the root cause and
work out how to do better next time.

04 Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® AXELOS.COM

2.4 WHY DID YOU CHOOSE ITIL?
ITIL was adopted in our affiliate company located in Venezuela back in 2007. Around 15 key IT resources
(managers and key personnel) became certified in ITIL Foundation in order to kick-start a new culture.

While the IT teams embraced ITIL, it took us years to get everyone else on board. However, as it became
more widely adopted and people began to see positive results, they joined the culture. It has taken time
and education to bring our staff along the ITIL journey.

ITIL exposed many of our previous deficiencies in IT, to the point where today we often bring an ITIL book
to meetings to support our discussions, (for example, with the Information Security team) because we
know it works.

2.5 HOW HAS ITIL TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION BEEN USEFUL

IN ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS?
To give you an analogy, ITIL Foundation has given us a new dictionary of words. Then, taking the
intermediate classes and attending webinars and local chapter meetings has given us the knowledge to
create sentences and paragraphs with those new words.

The business now understands that each business process needs an owner, (otherwise known as a
business relationship manager), who works with IT to improve how they work. As we grow and mature,
different roles have become relevant. Each needs defining along with the services they relate to.

Additionally, the bank has implemented project management methods, which are supported by ITIL.

2.6 WHAT PLANS DO YOU HAVE FOR THE FUTURE?

We are creating a knowledge management process for IT. We recently implemented a small knowledge
base for users, including a number of how-to documents to guide our staff and users through our practices.

The plan is to create knowledge articles at the conclusion of every project implementation. Similarly, an
article will be created each time we find a common solution to an IT-related issue. Users don’t always
realize they can do certain tasks themselves; we need to improve the knowledge base so they can source
this information. This is our goal for the next six months; we need to communicate how users can benefit
from the changes we are making.

2.7 HOW DO YOU COMMUNICATE WHAT YOU DO TO YOUR

EMPLOYEES?
We send a periodic email which informs employees of improvements and new processes we have adopted.
We use the corporate intranet to communicate bigger changes. We also have a portal through which we
inform users of current outages, along with an ETA for when the network will be up again.

AXELOS.COM Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® 05

3. What are your recommended Best Practices?
Top ITIL Do’s:

zz Only create an ITIL-related role once the need becomes evident

zz Differentiate between incident and request
zz Implement change management, no matter the size of the company
zz Know your services!

Top ITIL don’t Do’s:

zz Don’t introduce KPIs or CSFs that are too difficult to calculate or measure
zz Don’t create an ITIL role unless it is necessary.

06 Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® AXELOS.COM

4. About the author
Rosal Urdaneta was born in Venezuela and graduated from FIU (Florida
International University) in MIS (Management Information Systems). She has
worked in the banking industry since 1999.

Rosal has worked for 17 years in Mercantil Bank FKA Mercantil

Commercebank. Firstly as a Business Systems Analyst, then as a Business
Analyst Supervisor. In 2010 Rosal took over responsibility for the Service
Desk and the Support Business Analysts area. She is currently the IT Service
Manager. This role involves incident management, problem management,
knowledge management, request fulfillment and management, and
management of the ITSM tool (ServiceNow).

Rosal is certified in ITIL Service Strategy, ITIL Service Operations, and Six Sigma Green Belt.

She has been married for 17 years and is a mother of two boys. Rosal considers managing the three men
in her life as another full-time job!

AXELOS.COM Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® 07

5. About AXELOS
AXELOS is a joint venture company co-owned by the UK Government’s Cabinet Office and
Capita plc.

It is responsible for developing, enhancing and promoting a number of best practice

methodologies used globally by professionals working primarily in project, programme and
portfolio management, IT service management and cyber resilience.

The methodologies, including ITIL®, PRINCE2®, MSP® and the new collection of cyber
resilience best practice products, RESILIA®, are adopted in more than 150 countries to
improve employees’ skills, knowledge and competence in order to make both individuals and
organizations work more effectively.

In addition to globally recognized qualifications, AXELOS equips professionals with a wide range
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Visit www.AXELOS.com for the latest news about how AXELOS is ‘Making organizations
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[email protected].

6. Trade marks and statements

AXELOS®, the AXELOS swirl logo®, ITIL®, PRINCE2®, PRINCE2 Agile®, MSP®, M_o_R®,
P3M3®, P3O®, MoP®, MoV®, RESILIA® are registered trade marks of AXELOS Limited. All
rights reserved.

Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2018.

Cover image is copyright Mercantil Bank, N.A.

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AXELOS.COM Mercantil Bank – Adopting and adapting ITIL® 08

About this Case Study
This article details how one company used ITIL to
contribute to the success of its organization

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