CSG

Empowering end users with self-service access to operations procedures

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Empowered the organization with self-service access to operations procedures

Replaced expensive and cumbersome legacy tools that interfered with how his organization wants to work

With 500 clients and 4,000+ employees in over 20 countries, there is a good chance that CSG is the company behind your cable bill.

Continuing CSG’s tradition of being leaders in IT transformation, Phil Todd and his colleagues have a company-wide initiative to enable self-service operations (for example, restarting apps, clearing log directories, and provisioning infrastructure).

The Challenge:

Phil (Director, Software Development) found himself faced with expensive legacy tools. It became clear that these tools weren’t going to enable the broad self-service operations envisaged by Phil and his colleagues.

There were multiple problems with the existing legacy tools, including:

  • Built for a legacy, pre-cloud and DevOps era

  • Updating the automation required time-intensive centralized management from specialist teams

  • Didn’t fit into an SDLC and source control centric way of working

"The Rundeck team fully comprehends our business and technical issues and how to help."

 

Phil Todd

Director, Software Development

CSG

Rundeck at CSG: Today

Rundeck was initially brought in as the automated runbooks that manage Chef policies (used for server automation) and the delivery pipeline.
For CSG, the decision to deploy Rundeck was simple.

  • Usability: Rundeck’s quick set-up and easy-to-use interface sped adoption and reduce pushback.

  • ROI: Self-service automation saves teams countless hours

  • Security: Rundeck’s access controls and audit tracking help make self-service a reality

“It takes 5 minutes to see the value of Rundeck. I wish I’d had it 20 years ago.”

 

Phil Todd

Director, Software Development

CSG

Rundeck at CSG: What’s Next?

CSG next steps are leveraging Rundeck to establish true self-service operations across the company.

  • Self-service for All: Empower frontline staff, like the customer care team, to use automated runbooks created in Rundeck to address level 1 service issues.

  • Service Request Platform: Streamline the process for requestors of infrastructure or application environment updates. CSG is leveraging Rundeck to provide self-service access to provisioning tasks, even those with multiple dependencies (like database access).

  • Change Control/Request: Manual or out-of-band change control tracking can be arduous work. With Rundeck, the change request evidence is part of the job execution. These records reduce the overhead of both those making the change and those managing the change control process.

Learn more about CSG’s transformation

To learn more about how CSG is transforming its operations, watch this keynote by Phil’s colleagues, Scott Prugh and Erica Morrison at The DevOps Enterprise Summit.