Sallie Mae slashes change management costs and complexity with CA SCM

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1 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY Sallie Mae slashes change management costs and complexity with CA SCM CUSTOMER PROFILE Industry: Financial services Company: Sallie Mae Customers: 23 million Student loan portfolio: $272 billion BUSINESS Sallie Mae provides college savings plans, high-yield savings accounts and student loans for higher education. Since its foundation, the company has helped more than 31 million people pursue their academic goals. CHALLENGE Sallie Mae has hundreds of custom applications that help the organization process, service and collect student loans. To keep the applications updated, the company needs a robust software change management process. SOLUTION CA Software Change Manager (SCM) helps Sallie Mae automate and streamline software change management related workflows and processes throughout the lifecycle of a change order. BENEFIT Salle Mae has greater visibility and control of software changes, which improves efficiency, simplifies audits and increases agility. It has also resulted in annual cost savings of $1.6 million. agility made possible

2 Business America s leading savings program provider for higher education Sallie Mae is the number one US financial services company specializing in education. Since its foundation almost four decades ago, the company s saving programs, planning resources and financing options have helped more than 31 million people invest in higher education. The financial services firm helps families save for college through 529 different college savings plans, high-yield savings accounts and through its Upromise savings program. Sallie Mae and its subsidiaries currently manage $234 billion in education loans and administer $38 billion in college savings plans. Sallie Mae offers planning tools and resources to assist students, parents, and professionals with the financial aid process. It offers innovative private student loans that help customers save money and offer shorter repayment terms. Sallie Mae is also one of the leading financial service providers for universities and governments at all levels. Challenge Ensuring a consistent high value experience for millions of customers Sallie Mae s IT infrastructure plays a vital role in delivering a consistent, high value experience for its millions of customers. Critical processes such as lending, service and collection of student loans are all supported by IT. Sallie Mae needs a robust system to deliver core IT services, such as change, release and problem management to ensure its IT infrastructure continues to meet the evolving needs of the business. Maintaining an exceptional customer experience at a reasonable cost is a key priority for Sallie Mae s IT department. The organization is under pressure to do more with less and to ensure the best return on its investments, especially in today s difficult economic climate. This means the IT operation must remain lean and achieve quality targets in the most efficient and cost-effective way. With the scale and complexity of Sallie Mae s IT infrastructure, maximizing resources is a must. Off-the-shelf tools are limited so the IT team is responsible for not only developing proprietary systems but also keeping them up to date. Sallie Mae s enterprise IT environment consists of hundreds of custom-built applications, mainframe devices and distributed systems consisting of around 2,000 physical and virtual servers, several SQL and Oracle databases and 10,000 desktops. Managing the software change lifecycle Executing changes and resolving problems across this heterogeneous IT environment can be time-consuming and complex without the right IT management tools and processes. 02

3 Mary Boscacci, Chief Process Architect for IT Service Management at Sallie Mae, explains, One of the challenges that IT faced was an ineffective, manual software change and source code management process. Existing systems used for development lifecycle and governance were mostly siloed and adoption varied from team to team. This disparity was intensified by the use of multiple tools throughout the development process in particular for controlling source code. We needed a consolidated process and centralized solution that could help improve our productivity and efficiency adds Boscacci. Existing standard systems used for development lifecycle and governance were mostly siloed. Mary Boscacci Chief Process Architect for IT Service Management, Sallie Mae Solution Consistent change management for 100 applications Sallie Mae has been successfully using CA Software Change Manager (SCM) to support its IT service management efforts since CA SCM s strong capabilities both as a standalone product and an integrated component of a larger CA Technologies solution set add tremendous value to Sallie Mae s IT management portfolio. Successfully implemented by CA Services and partners in 2007, the solution delivers consistently high value to the organization year after year. We immediately gained a consistent software change management process with a governance framework and automated workflows that helps ensure corporate processes are followed, comments Boscacci. CA SCM is Sallie Mae s prime enterprise solution for open systems code management. Every development team in the organization uses CA SCM to make over 200 changes per month across more than 100 applications. By leveraging the integration between CA SCM and other CA Technologies solutions, Sallie Mae has gained greater accuracy and automation to the entire change management lifecycle. 03

4 As Boscacci explains, A change request is simply logged in CA Service Desk Manager then seamlessly worked into CA SCM as part of an automated workflow. As the request order progresses through the change lifecycle, the status is updated in both solutions right through to when the new code is released to a staging area. 200 changes per month executed with CA SCM Integrated IT service management In addition to helping to simplify the change management process, CA Service Desk Manager is used to track around 50,000 contacts made to the organization s helpdesk every month by its 8,500 employees. CA Service Desk Manager is just one of a number of solutions being used by Sallie Mae as part of its ITSM approach. For example, CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) is used by Sallie Mae to manage more than 5,500 projects and 3,700-plus ideas. The solution also plays a key role in the change management process as it enables Sallie Mae to link application changes, releases and incidents to the original request from the business. Sallie Mae has recently expanded its CA Technologies portfolio with CA Agile Vision, which supports Agile development processes and enables better resource utilization. We hope to be able to integrate CA Agile Vision with CA SCM and create automated builds in the future, comments Boscacci. 04

5 Benefit An enhanced customer experience and improved efficiency Greater visibility and control to its change management processes helps Sallie Mae to improve the accuracy and speed of making updates to its core business applications. We ve achieved all our objectives from the implementation of CA SCM, confirms Boscacci. Not only do we now have higher productivity, we also have greater insight and traceability throughout the change management lifecycle. This level of control is not only important for internal governance but also in external audits, which are a critical requirement for any financial services organization. CA SCM gives us visibility into every process and enables us to trace changes back to their origin. It provides a one-stop-shop for auditors, comments Boscacci. As a result, audits are now easier to fulfill with less effort and expense. Sallie Mae has also been able to generate significant cost savings by eliminating multiple legacy software change management tools in favor of a consolidated platform. This software rationalization effort combined with process improvements around change and release management has helped Sallie Mae to save $1.6 million per year. Cost-effective and highly efficient change management helps Sallie Mae to: Respond more quickly to business and regulatory change requirements Improve the customer experience. The company s use of CA Technologies solutions as part of its ITSM and ITIL frameworks has delivered substantial financial and operational efficiency gains. With IT playing a vital role in our core business, every performance improvement we make has a direct impact on our customers, concludes Boscacci. Audits are now easier to fulfill with less effort and expense. Mary Boscacci Chief Process Architect for IT Service Management, Sallie Mae 05

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