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When I think about the U. S. Marines, I do not think about Generals, Harrier Jets, or Military Police. The first thing I always think about is Drill Sergeants! The reason I think of Drill Sergeants or Drill Instructors (DIs) could be the fact that when I was a kid, my father was a DI. Making sure the recruits understood the "good of the many" outweighed the "good of the few" made his success. But he started each boot camp with standard processes that have evolved over the last 200 years and have been adopted by all Drill Instructors across The Corps.
So what do U.S. Marines have in common with transforming your IT services agency to be the lean, mean, service machine everyone expects? Everything! The Drill Instructor starts with basics; basic crew cut, basic clothes, and basic training. You and your organization can start transformation of your agency or organization with basic processes and procedures that have evolved over the last four decades for the IT community-ITIL.
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a "library" of best practices that has been evolving and adapting to new technologies since the 70's. This library of best practices and methodologies has been created by a community of IT professionals that actually do the work, manage the environment, and overcome the business obstacles.
The purpose of ITIL is to align IT services with the agency's business objectives and provide competitive advantages for the agency or organization by using the best practices in areas such as financial management, problem management, change and configuration management, and service level management. Every Federal, State, and Local government will tell you the same thing; they want the best service at the lowest cost. What does "best service at the lowest cost" mean? We should simply say the business wants the right amount of service, at the right time, at the lowest cost possible, to meet its objectives. The IT organization should be considered as a tool for the business to reach its objective, as a lever to turn services on and off. So if the agency's business objective is to supply social services benefits to the citizens of the state at any time of day or night, then the agency should just turn their IT lever "on" for those services 24*7*366 (leap year).
How do you transform your agency to deliver the right amount of service, at the right time, at the lowest possible cost? Buzzwords like consolidate, one-stop-shop, economies-of-scale, reengineer, and centralize may be the first methods to come to mind. The Marine Drill Instructor starts on Paris Island with new recruits and standard procedures that are tested, used, documented, and refined over the years. You should do the same when transforming your organization by using proven processes the IT community has been documenting and refining for decades in the IT Infrastructure Library. You don't have to create a new "wheel"; you only have to pick the best "wheel" from the library and install it. The "wheel" you will use from ITIL has already been tested and used by hundreds of other organizations with tangible results.
Service Level Management is maintaining and improving IT service quality through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring, and reporting to meet customers' business objectives. Because of your evolution process, you probably range the gamut on service levels provided to your customers from 8 to 12 hours a day. Some end users may even get support 24 hours per day, weekend support, or holiday support, but most after-hours support is usually done by on-call support. This could mean that at any given time there are 100+ people being used for on-call support. Since there are no service catalogs, there may be end users trying unsuccessfully to supply citizens with services because their applications are down and they don't know who to call.
With ITIL processes in Service Level Management, poor service for end users can be eliminated. Quality of service is agreed to, based on the needs of each agency, and monitored accordingly. Because of inter-agency cooperation, there are operational agreements that cascade through other support organizations to meet the end user requirements. All of these services are measured. The process is self-correcting in that each department is accountable for their own service levels rather than being accountable for the entire service supply chain. This is helpful because nobody knows where in the chain which service was interrupted.
Problem Management seeks to get to the root cause and initiate action to remove the error. With the evolution of support in your agency, about 40% of your support organizations are on home grown systems (spending time writing and supporting applications that do not have the ITIL processes of Problem Management built into them.) There is another 40% of Incident Management applications that may have some of the processes built into them, but are not used because of resource allocations, training or many other reasons. The remaining 20% of your support teams that have the application with built-in ITIL processes and that use them can only affect small changes based on the end user where they have immediate control.
Having not only the right ITIL compliant application, but also using the ITIL processes and best practices will help fix problems faster and keep problems from happening in the first place. With ITIL processes, support organizations will understand classification, trend analysis, diagnosis, and the root cause of problems. With operational agreements in place with other support organizations, you can be proactive about deleting the problems rather than continuing to fix the problems over, and over, and over again. These processes will get to the root cause of the problems and initiate the action necessary to remove the errors.
Transformation of an organization takes time, resources, and effort. Most states and large organizations take over 18 months to move through managed growth, incident management, problem management, service level management and the rest of the ITIL processes. As you will note, there is a mixture of technology, people and process changes involved in this transformation process. You cannot use a "silver bullet" to transform your organization, nor can you use only technology and processes. ITIL transformation is a balanced approach across your support organization to bring about streamlined procedures and efficiency while eliminating waste and reducing costs.
The speed with which agencies and organizations apply information technology and optimize their IT resources is becoming more critical to their overall performance. The transformation to service management solutions and services that can be delivered by using ITIL best practices is of enormous short-term and strategic value, especially as Information Technology needs continue to expand more rapidly than IT budget allocations. ITIL will guide your IT organizations in communicating with internal constituencies, defining end user needs, providing IT services, allocating resources, optimizing service levels and managing service delivery from a financial perspective. By bringing this "bottom-line" discipline to your IT organizations and processes, the same way the U.S. Marines bring discipline with Drill Instructors, you will be transforming your organizations so that IT will remain closely aligned with the needs of the business and provide significant competitive advantages.
"Semper Fi"
About the Author
Mark Latham works full time creating and implementing Service Support and Service Delivery processes for Federal, State, and Private organizations. He is a speaker at National Support events; Instructs Directors on how to take waste from their operations, and is ITIL certified. He works as the Vice President for Customer Solutions at STI Knowledge, a Business Process Outsourcing company in Atlanta Georgia.
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