Established in 1989, Goal Group provides global securities class actions recoveries and withholding tax reclaims for investors around the world. It prides itself on offering safe and secure services that help maximise shareholder returns.

Together with the BJSS Managed Service team, Goal Group has radically transformed its IT operations. This has proven to be fundamental to the company’s digital transformation, survival and growth.

“Outsourcing to BJSS was the catalyst to Goal achieving many of its corporate objectives and entering new, highly profitable markets. Their team are consummate professionals with an outstanding client-focussed work ethic that has taken our business to a higher plain than we could previously have foreseen culminating in winning a prestigious sales award from a Top 4 accounting firm.”

(Stephen Everard, CEO, Goal Group)

The Challenge

As a leading class action and international tax reclamation services specialist, Goal has grown an impressive global client base of truly blue-chip organisations. However, the company’s IT operations did not mirror the company’s growth.

Its applications were unstable, and it was burdened by complex on-premise legacy infrastructure and applications. The legacy nature of Goal’s infrastructure resulted in poor client experiences due to inefficient processes, elongated sales cycles due to long IT lead times and unacceptably high business risk. It needed to transform its infrastructure and service management at pace to ensure business continuity, regulatory compliance, and future growth.

While Goal had a small internal IT team in place, they did not have the skills to modernise its operations. This skills gap led to Goal outsourcing to the BJSS Managed Service team to stabilise and modernise its IT operations.

The Solution

Our aim from the outset was to deliver a modern managed IT service for Goal.

At the start of the engagement, we had to overcome several extremely complex challenges including high levels of instability, an undocumented estate with only 20% of infrastructure being monitored, and undefined patching and licensing policies.

Undeterred by these challenges, we commenced taking on Goal’s service management by using the Enterprise Agile approach. A phased approach was taken to onboard the various ITIL processes. This started with a Minimum Viable Service that was covered by the ISO 27001 accredited BJSS Technical Support Service in Leeds. This helped to resolve any minor service issues in the early phases.

We then continuously improved the service, introducing three more phases over three months:

  • Phase 1 - Release, change and incident management
  • Phase 2 - Event and problem management
  • Phase 3 - License, capacity, availability, service level, configuration, and infrastructure management

The result was a comprehensive managed service that stabilised Goal’s applications, backup, and storage policies and rationalised its systems. Service desk tickets were also reduced to a normal level.

Benefits

Business stability

Without our Managed Service, there was a strong likelihood that Goal would have gone out of business. Instead, Goal has been able to stabilise and modernise its IT operations which have been central to the company’s success. We now support them with a fully functional service desk achieving 97.2% SLA compliance. Self-service based processes have been introduced, reducing service requests by 50%, and we have helped to reduce Goal’s infrastructure costs by 25%.

Increased resilience

Today, Goal Group’s IT infrastructure is unrecognisable since we took on the service. Before engaging BJSS, Goal’s applications were highly unstable and were preventing the business from growing at the pace it desired. Our long-standing Managed Service with Goal has seen it stabilise its legacy applications and migrate them to the cloud. Goal now benefits from the features of a modern AWS managed service, bringing greater resilience and reliability for a significantly lower price. Disaster recovery times have been reduced from six weeks to one day, and Goal’s security and compliance posture has drastically improved. This increased resilience has made Goal a reliable and trusted partner to its clients.

Ability to change and adapt

By continuously improving Goal’s Managed Service, we have been able to evolve how the company operates. It is now more flexible and agile than ever before. With all of Goal’s applications securely migrated to the cloud, it is easier to manage and improve them as well as develop new cloud-native applications. As part of our Managed Service, we developed the cloud-native Adroit software for Goal. As well as being able to create cloud-native applications, the Managed Service helped build the foundations for Goal’s remote working model. Now, all of Goal Group’s staff from around the world can securely access its applications and data remotely. This is not just essential for business continuity, but it allowed Goal to adapt and survive during the Covid-19 crisis.