Company Overview

With close to 96,000 staff and 1,000 sites across the country, the U.K. government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) sets welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. It administers state pensions and a range of disability and ill health benefits for around 22 million claimants and customers. While infrastructure plays a fundamental role in how citizens access and engage with the department’s services, a sprawling IT estate with monolithic systems and disparate databases was becoming too complex to manage.

The Challenge

Daniel Barella, Infrastructure Services Enterprise Tooling Lead at DWP, says, “If we lose our IT platforms and systems, many people can’t eat, pay their rent, get back to work, or provide for their children. So, our number one priority is always ensuring the best possible service uptime.”

DWP also wanted to remove information silos and accelerate the use of digital citizen services. Barella explains, “To be more efficient would mean moving to a microservices reference architecture with data used and shared across multiple apps and adopting automation with self-healing capabilities.”

BMC solutions are important to this change.

The Solution

BMC Helix Discovery forms a central IT asset registry and modeling system to deliver a comprehensive view into DWP’s hardware, software, and service assets. It also enables oversight of physical, virtual, and cloud interdependencies.

TrueSight Capacity Optimization helps IT teams visualize IT resources—anticipating and managing demand changes while TrueSight Operations Management analyzes and prioritizes event data. These solutions leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities, making it easier to quickly predict, find, and fix issues.

With these solutions, DWP can collaborate more closely on root cause analysis and problem-solving while progressing service improvement and development plans. Crucially, they no longer have to navigate multiple monitoring tools, inaccurate IT asset registers, and the inability to spot capacity problems.

“BMC is able to pull information from multiple toolsets and provide a holistic viewpoint,” says Barella. “That’s very powerful. We use TrueSight Automation Network for network compliance and automation activities. And, thanks to TrueSight Capacity Optimization, we don’t burn money on under-utilized capacity.”

The Results

Looking ahead, DWP is well placed to automate routine and reactive IT tasks, freeing up highly skilled teams to focus on digital transformation and service improvement tasks.

Barella says, “We can do lots of things that we’ve never been able to do before through full visibility of our platforms, how the supporting technologies connect with each other, and the practical steps we can take to improve performance. Insight from BMC gives us all that and more.”

Results achieved since the start of the BMC deployment include 100 percent system uptime along with 98 percent asset observability, which even extends into the hybrid cloud environment. Improved capacity oversight has contributed to financial savings, and DWP has seen a fall in false-positive alerts, which used to be one of the biggest time wasters for its IT operations (ITOps) staff.

Barella concludes, “We can anticipate when something’s going to happen on a particular time or date. And what the user experience impact would be if we added, say, another 20,000 users.”