When Nottinghamshire Building Society (NBS) decided to overhaul its IT infrastructure, it also took steps to better monitor system performance.

Founded in 1849, the Nottingham Building Society has 30 branches across Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, and assets worth more than £3bn.

According to chief information officer (CIO) Jack Cutts, the renewal programme, which began in 2006, followed a seven-year period of little or no IT investment. “Our systems were showing their age,” he says.

The arrival of a new chief executive led to a strategic review of all the building society’s processes, which “pointed to a need for us to be much more efficient and agile in the market we were in".

Cutts recalls: “When I joined the organisation it wasn't just a lack of investment in the core systems that was the problem, there was a lack of investment in the entire infrastructure.”

Since 2006, the Nottingham has replaced all its PCs and servers, built a new computer room and disaster recovery suite, upgraded its network, implemented a storage area network (SAN) and virtualisation, and upgraded Active Directory.

As well as renewing its IT infrastructure, the building society also had to update its in-house skills. “We had people who were good at what they were doing, but their skill sets were at least five years out of date,” says Cutts.

The programme also saw the deployment of a new mortgage administration package from IT services firm Tieto that links to the COSbatch enterprise job scheduling package – another new addition.

To improve systems monitoring, Cutts and his team rolled out a service level management (SLM) solution from performance and availability monitoring firm Nimsoft.

The Nimsoft SLM package runs on the firm’s Unix servers and is accessed through desktop PCs. The software is mainly used to monitor CPU and memory usage, while in the case of the Nottingham’s COSbatch package it is used to analyse error logs. “Primarily we are looking at performance availability. We are not checking the network service level agreements – they're monitored via our network provider,” says Cutts.

Cutts says Nimsoft’s solution began making a positive impact of the building society’s operations within hours of deployment by helping to solve problems with the firm’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.

“The IVR was causing problems for our telephone banking operation on a regular basis because there was no monitoring,” Cutts says. “We kept dropping lines, leading to a lot of customer complaints.”

Nimsoft’s system reads log files every five minutes looking for certain error codes and alerts IT staff through email and mobile messages.

Cutts says it took about an hour to integrate Nimsoft’s package with the IVR system, after which any line that went down was picked up and sorted out immediately, and complaints dropped to zero.

“From a customer service point of view it paid for itself within the first hour and half, and for an ROI that's not bad. I've been round IT for 25 years and I've never seen anything make so much difference so quickly,” says Cutts.

As to the future, Cutts says he is looking to enable Nimsoft’s system to look at indicators of possible future failures.