To put the IT journey into perspective: just as at other organisations, the IT evolution in SEB has moved very fast. We implemented our first mainframe machine and IT systems about 70 years ago, and since then SEB's IT service offering has increased significantly and there has been a major shift from monolithic systems to micro services, with solutions moving from being on-prem to cloud and hybrid solutions. To support this development, the IT workforce has increased as well. At the turn of the millennium, we had about 1,000 employees working within IT. Ten years later, we had increased the IT workforce by 1,000 employees and by 2020, by an additional 1,000 employees.
With the rapid IT expansion, there are of course challenges. More IT services and employees supporting these make it harder to keep observability and understanding of the IT landscape. The requirements from the end users have also shifted and it's no longer enough to have good uptime of IT services, but we also need to make sure we have great response times and ensure we are proactive in fulfilling end user needs.
To make sure we keep pushing the boundaries, SEB drives a strategic AIOps initiative to create intelligent observability for our IT deliveries and shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset, introducing machine learning and artificial intelligence into our IT operations.
In SEB's AIOps-themed blogposts we will dig deeper into what AIOps at SEB is, some of the prerequisites, what it means to work with AIOps and what the future holds.
We hope you are as excited as we are!
