A large financial services company (FSC) serves the United States, Canada and Mexico. They are aligned into three major business segments: business bank, retail bank and wealth management.

To meet competitive and customer demands typical of many large organizations across multiple industries, the FSC was implementing a private cloud and had many different needs around the IBM Tivoli Software they were using to build it. Once successfully established, Tivoli would enable the FSC to run smarter, more efficiently and with greater agility. In fact, the FSC was not unlike many other organizations looking to use cloud technologies to manage costs and reduce time to market for new services and to use big data to improve customer experience.

The FSC selected Global Knowledge to build and deliver the training, because we have the experience and know-how to provide the expert, customized IBM Tivoli training needed in a short time frame.

We started by using our proprietary five-step methodology, SOLVE, that enables us to determine and understand an organization's unique learning needs and business goals, design and implement a tailored, measurable solution, and provide continuous program improvements.

We performed a skills gap analysis to determine the difference between the skills the FSC needed to effectively implement a private cloud and the skills possessed by those who would be responsible for doing the work. Then, the FSC worked with Global Knowledge experts to combine the most relevant content from three different IBM Tivoli classes into one custom IBM Service Delivery Manager (ISDM) training solution. The content covered introductory, processing, integration, configuration, automation, accounting, and reporting aspects of the Tivoli software.

The training initiative was led internally by an FSC project manager who pulled together the initial 24 FSC students representing key job roles for the Tivoli initiative.

Twenty-four people participated in the initial program, with the potential for 10 additional training courses to be run as the FSC's Tivoli/cloud implementation gathers momentum and becomes increasingly complex and detailed. The program's success has sparked a growing business relationship as the FSC further explores the capabilities of Global Knowledge learning solutions and discovers the advantages of working with an experienced worldwide training partner.