Douglas Consulting Group

Achieving Success through a Journey

For a company to implement improvements to their IT Operational environment through the use of the ITIL framework, it is similar to a group of people embarking on a journey. The two are similar in many aspects. The destination needs to be agreed upon, the starting points needs to be aligned, and the route needs to have everyone's agreement and commitment.

During the trip, sometimes changes in destination are made when the travelers modify their route, taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, such as seeing an attractive tourist attraction or seeking cheap gas. Using ITIL as a roadmap will allow for these adjustments. ITIL is a flexible framework that insists that changes to the IT environment are business justified.

ITIL does not dictate the destination point for a companies' IT journey, it enables the Business and IT Department to take the journey together.

The Douglas Consulting Group invites you to preview "The Journey To Success" by selecting the links above.

LOOK AROUND

At some point, IT Divisions consider that fact that they need to improve how IT Operations are being performed, or they identify the need to improve the IT Operational metrics. Sometimes they recognize the need to improve themselves, sometimes that are told by the Business, IT Users or Customers that definite improvements are needed.

Since you are browsing this web site, let's assume you are looking for ideas on how to improve IT Operational performance. Your organization had identified ITIL as a potential framework, you are sending people through the ITIL Foundation course, or you may even be conducting assessments to gain a handle on where you are from a maturity or capability perspective.

Congratulations - you are at the starting point! Looking around happens somewhere between this point, and the point your company decides to take action regarding a formal IT Operational Improvement Initiative or Program.

Goal

Before starting a journey for IT Operational improvements, it is important to clearly understand where you are starting the journey. Your company may have taken several journeys before, such as launching an ISO initiative, a Quality Improvement Program, or implementing a major system, like SAP. Some of these journeys were successful, some failed. It is important to understand why the successes and failures happened, so that the IT Operations Initiative can leverage the successes and reduce the risks of becoming another flash in the pan Corporate Initiative.

Factors that will help "make it" or "break it" need to be understood, in order to define the true starting point.

1. Culture of the Company
2. Management Commitment
3. Business Case
4. Understand What is Working

Benefits

Taking a moment to look around, will provide some tangible benefits to your journey, such as:

• This effort will take advantage of past company experiences (both positive and negative)
• If the Leadership or Culture is not supportive - DON'T START, fix that first.
• Get a single perspective - if every IT department has a different understanding of what is going on and how to fix it, you will still have several incompatible approaches, even though you are attempting to get to the same place!
• When times get tough, you can rely on your strengths, business case, management commitment, drive to improve
• Measurements and metrics of where you are take the emotions out of situation and allow you to work with facts

WHERE TO START

Now that you have decided to take action and are assured that this effort has the required backing, the next big question is, where do we start? The reality is: there is no right or wrong answer in terms of where to start. Every company has a unique business environment and has different IT Operations requirements. So the first step in your journey is to understand where you are, and then determine where you want to go. Here are several considerations, which will help you determine your starting point.

1. How is IT aligned with the Business Direction?
   1. Are there stated corporate (Business) goals that the IT Organization needs to fulfill?
   2. What is the relationship between the IT department and the business divisions?
   3. Is the ITIL initiative aligned with the other business initiatives?
2. How quickly does ITIL have to be implemented?
   1. Is IT impacting the business to deliver its products or services?
   2. Is this need well known to Business and IT executives or only to the IT Operations staff?
   3. How fast do results need to be demonstrated?
3. What is the Financial Position?
   1. Is there a bucket of money waiting to be invested in IT?
   2. Will a fixed IT Operations budget sustain the ITIL implementation?
   3. Is it perceived that IT improvements are an operations responsibility, thus coming out of the operations budget?
4. Does your IT Organization utilize capabilities that will enable your ITIL improvement journey?
   1. Does your organization use policies or standards to sanction and enforce behavior?
   2. Are there standards and templates used to document processes, tool designs, metrics and training materials?
   3. What percentage of IT Operations is outsourced? Are contracts in place to measure their conformance?

Goal

This is the most important part of your journey. If there is consensus, dedication, trust and motivation, the journey will provide both short and long term benefits. IF there is confusion, strife, conflicting agendas and culture wars, this effort will end up on the scrap heap. The opponents to this initiative will use every opportunity, every weakness to maintain the status quo.

ITIL has a publication titled: "Planning to Implement Service Management". Our suggestion is to purchase that book and leverage the following approaches:

• Determine the Justification (business drivers, technology Drivers, IT Organization in change
• Determine the Benefits you expect to obtain (Business, Financial, Employee, and Innovation)
• Identify all stakeholders and determine their criteria for success
• Create the Vision and set the direction
• Clearly document where you are now, Where you want to be, and How you want to get there

Benefits

• A documented and communicated strategy and plan will illustrate to the employees (and to the rest of the business) exactly how seriously Leadership is taking this effort.
• An IT Strategy will allow the company to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves so that the needs of the business are always in the forefront.
• The improvement goals are always in balance with the available budget, investments, and time allotments

WORK TOGETHER

Many companies have identified that their IT divisions work in silos, (i.e. network, applications, desktop). They recognize that they must stop working independently and start cooperating. Getting the organization to working together is a bigger effort than simply re-organizing the staff. Designing an organization that works well together involves a significant cultural change. A cooperative directorate understands all the capabilities of the organization, determines the roles for each capability, and removes duplication and redundancy.

Goal

Establishing a consistent environment enables the organization to work together. A consistent environment is where the capabilities (people, processes and tools) of the organization are known and the significant "turf battles" of competing organizations can be rationalized. Working together is more of a cultural goal in which is enabled by understanding how the current IT Operational environment is structured. Many IT Operational environments have evolved over the years, from past leadership, numerous reorganizations, changes in strategy, and implementing several short term visions. The future mode of working together needs to come from an defined plan, strategy and overall expected outcomes.

How is a consistent environment attained?

• Change the culture of rewarding independence and introduce the culture of rewarding cooperation and conformance
• Understand and continually emphasize the common goals of all IT supplier organizations, that is, to provide timely and cost justifiable IT Services to the business
• Introduce an industry accepted framework like ITIL that can be accepted, adapted and used to map all of the existing group's capabilities.
• Institute a decision making capability (governance) that will allow each team representation on the decision, but empower a certain number of personal the means to make, communicate and enforce the decision.
• Implement a series of IT policies, such as the Change Policy, Release Policy, Configuration Policy. Those things that can be agreed upon are, they are documented and put into place. Those things that cannot be agreed upon immediately are given the time, debate and consensus to be determined appropriately.

Benefits

• The organization sees the value of the program/initiative and embraces the required cultural change
• NO existing capabilities are thrown away, but are leveraged to all organizations
• "Competition" between groups evolves into "cooperation"

INTEGRATION

Groups that are working together generate positive results and deliverables, but are still not optimized to perform at their peek performance. Integration is in place when both objectives have been met 1) All groups understand the roles that they play in the bigger picture and 2) The roles have been designed to complement each other to provide a single set of IT deliverables. This is not done by accident or evolution, it has to be carefully architected, designed, and implemented within a company's IT departments and suppliers.

The ITIL publication titled: "Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Infrastructure Management" identifies a larger IT Enterprise Release framework that can be subscribed to by all IT suppliers to contribute to a single release approach.

Goal

An integrated IT Operational Environment starts with the design. For a company to have an integrated IT Technology, they appoint A Chief Technology Officer, a Chief Information Officer, Network Architects, Application Architects, Data Architects, that work together to determine the direction along with all of the technical capabilities. But in most organizations, who is the architect over the IT Operational Environment? Who defines the overall direction and the Operational Capabilities, such as People, Process and Tools? The result of not staffing the IT Operations Architect, leads to the application team or the desktop team "throwing solutions" over the fence to the production environment, placing the Operations Team into reaction mode.

One of the ITIL publications asks the question, "What is the Primary IT Deliverable?" As we do seminars and facilitate workshops, I have asked this question to IT Leadership of many companies. Most IT Leaders have not even considered the question. For all IT Leaders, the answer should be immediate and require no thought. The answer in itself is the justification for IT integration, it is the single goal for all IT suppliers to contribute to, it is the business justification of all IT spending. The answer to the question, what is the primary IT deliverable is of course, Availability. Without IT availability, in most cases, the business will not function. From the Service Delivery Publication, page 223: states: "Availability cannot be purchased... it must be designed, implemented, measured and managed.

Benefits

• The holistic scope and view of the IT Environment is managed and all IT suppliers understand their integrated role
• The IT organization can optimize the design of the IT environment to meet the specific needs of the business in a cost justifiable manner.
• The interfaces and interdependencies of People, Process and Technology is understood, allowing for quick and accurate responses to the changing business need
• The IT environments is pro-active to the needs of the business

PARTNER WITH THE BUSINESS

What does it mean for the IT Department to be a partner with the business? It means that IT is treated like every other division of the company, Financial, Marketing, Sales, and Human Resources. IT must break out of its "own" language (terminology) and cultures and work to embrace and interact with the other divisions of the business. For IT to be treated as an equal partner with IT, it must communicate on a business level and stop using Techno speak.

ITIL has two publications from the Business Perspective which provide insight into the development and delivery of quality Information Systems services to maximize business objectives and benefits.

For IT to be a genuine partner with the business, IT may need to institute the following characteristics or traits

• Accept the business terminology and do not speak in Megabits and Gigabytes. The technology terms are good for communicating to the IT suppliers, but not the leaders of manufacturing, financial or human resources.
• Contribute ideas to the business of how IT capabilities can increase their sales or market share.
• Provide ideas to eliminate corporate waste. By understanding IT service offerings, and charging services to the business, the IT department has a handle on the total IT spend, and can identify where the most money is being spent for the least value to the company.
• Enable Business units to control their own IT spend. By defining the IT Services, producing a cost and charging structure, the Business units can order their own IT Services, based on their needs and available budgets. This allows IT to remain a significant resource to the other business units, while allowing the business units to make their appropriate decisions regarding how they use IT.

GOAL

The End-goal for IT Departments will change, as they improve their IT Operations environment and mature over time. One question that is raised when we assist clients in developing their vision is, "when does it stop?" Well, for some companies, their "Optimized state" is when a certain set of goals is met, for others, when the investment to achieve the next level costs more than the expected return. Yet for others, it never ends, since the business is always adjusting, the IT journey for continuous improvement needs to always adjust.

The good news for most IT journey takers, is that the initial investment to go from "today's state to stable", and from "stable to consistent" and finally from "consistent to stable" is where the majority of the costs are spent. To continually improve, a structured investment strategy should suffice. The costs involved in changing the IT culture, invest in processes and tool improvements and developing an environment that is error free is a significant effort, which can take several years.

The bottom line is... the journey never ends. Identified improvements should be developed and implemented, as long as business justification merits. The journey may never end, since it will be driven by the needs of the business.