When the wheels touched down, the weight of the task hit the moment everyone stepped into the thick, stale Texas air. Bernie, Adamsen, Ian, and Paul grabbed their bags and drove straight to the client’s office to kick things off and size up the complexity in front of them.
The Challenge
The client, a large credit union, had just acquired a call center from a major insurance provider. The Transition Services Agreement (TSA) gave the team six months to build a new data center and migrate the call center systems and PBX from Minnesota to Texas without disrupting operations or impacting member experience.
The technology landscape was an organic collection of systems that had grown up over time. One local IT guy knew the applications well, though most of that knowledge lived in his head. The call center worked, but no one could clearly explain how it all fit together. The job was to build the structure that could carry the migration quietly, so the credit union and its members never noticed anything had shifted.
Work like this comes down to knowing the connections. Unfortunately, that was the least understood part of the environment. The team needed a map of how the applications talked to each other, and they were running out of time. So the guys went analog.
The Solution
Bernie dug into the day-to-day workflow of a call center operator when a member called in. Ian designed and managed the data center build, including electrical, HVAC, compute, storage, and connectivity back to Minnesota, so when the time came, the cutover could happen cleanly.
That left Adamsen and Paul to unravel the application interfaces. Grabbing sticky notes, pens, tape, and string, the plan called for the local IT team to build a physical model of their digital world. Bernie walked them through the operator’s flow: take a call, authenticate a member, log notes, respond to balance inquiries, escalate fraud, enroll members in digital services, send email, and handle time-off requests. Every step revealed another dependency.
Before long, the application map emerged. Once the team could see it, the rest became a sequencing problem: follow the dependencies, migrate in the right order, and avoid breaking what the business needed to run every minute of the day.
The Results
Cutover went smoothly. Later, in a room full of credit union executives, the story they told the press was about a “new level of service for their members.”
For us, the outcome wasn’t unusual. But that day, in Texas, in 2009, marked the beginning of Metagyre, Inc.’s relationship with credit unions.
Today, credit union clients benefit even more from our structure: it makes the invisible visible, so strategic execution happens predictably—without drama.
That is how we got to Texas
