Joint Managerial Body (JMB)
Managed Services & Helpdesk Support
Company
The JMB was founded in 1972 to represent the interests of all voluntary secondary schools in the Republic of Ireland. It is the main decision-making and negotiating body for the management authorities of almost 400 voluntary secondary schools. The JMB comprises two founding organisations: AMCSS and the ISA, the Irish School Heads’ Association, representing Protestant Schools in the State. The JMB participates actively in various National Committees involved in policy and decision-making in Irish Education. The JMB negotiates on all management issues such as contracts of employment and employer / employee relations. It represents the voluntary secondary schools in negotiations on all issues at national level that affect the management of schools.
Challenge
The JMB IT infrastructure was failing to deliver the required performance levels based on the applications currently in use throughout the organisation. The existing environment presented significant issues to users within the JMB on a daily basis and although they had invested significantly in their IT infrastructure in recent years it had failed to deliver the levels of performance required. Numerous attempts to resolve the issues has been made by the incumbent provider but all had failed and the decision was taken to identify another IT support company with the expertise to review the existing infrastructure and come up with a plan of action. It was also noted by management that there was little or no proactive engagement from the current provider with little forward planning. Through numerous recommendations ERS were identified as the IT Solutions Managed Services Company of choice and were engaged to perform a complete infrastructure review and presented the JMB management with the findings along with an IT strategic plan that would scale and grow with them moving forward.
Solution
ERS assigned one of their infrastructure architects to perform a complete review of the JMB environment. It did not take long to identify that the server currently deployed was unfit for purpose and incapable of managing the virtualised environment that had been configured and deployed. A report was completed and presented to the JMB management outlining the reason for the current problems and outlining how the current problems could be rectified moving forward. A key part of the final solution was not only the deployment of a new virtualised server within the JMB environment but a server configured using best practice methodology with adequate resources to ensure that their business critical applications would perform as expected. Underpinning the new server infrastructure would be the ERS x360 Managed Services Framework where managed software agents would be deployed across all JMB devices to proactively monitor the environment and take action where necessary.
Results
Since ERS performed the infrastructure upgrade in summer 2015 the JMB environment and user experience has been transformed. The sever deployed now has the resources and capacity to run all required applications and is configured to ensure that applications can run independently without impacting others. The JMB environment is now fully managed using agent software that monitors for critical events and takes proactive steps to avoid user disruption. JMB also receive monthly health check reports outlining any critical events that may have occurred. These reports are then reviewed at the quarterly IT review meetings to identify any issues and make proactive recommendations for the business moving forward.
