Barclays bases IT services on ITIL guidelines

Barclays bank has used ITIL, the Infrastructure Libray best practices programme, to improve how IT support is run.

The three-and-a-half year change management programme, called Galahad, has seen a marked improvement in the number of technical support calls that can be fixed by first line support staff. In August 2006, only 16% of support queries from end-users could be fixed at this stage. The latest data, taken in April 2007, has found that between 70% and 89% of calls are fixed by first line support.

Barclays made a number of changes to improve IT support. First, the bank needed to make sure staffing levels were adequate. The second change involved training, which allowed the helpdesk team to better appreciate how the bank operated.

Training of helpdesk staff needed altering to address the support issues, said John Roberts, an IT manager at the UK Business Banking Technology office of Barclays bank, speaking at the itSMF (IT Service Management Forum) conference in Brighton this week. "The Helpdesk staff did not understand the business," he said.