Top 5 must-have processes for IT service management

In these times of uncertainty we are all now familiar with a single word: “austerity”. In the boom times before the global economies went into meltdown I suspect many people had never even heard the word, let alone had to live that way, but now we are all being asked to tighten our belts – and this applies to companies as well. Now more than ever, investing in IT Service Management makes sense, but not in the same way as a  few years ago, when the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) became a real trend. Many companies’ objectives were to adopt all processes, regardless of whether they were appropriate or useful for them.  Now the focus has changed. Organisations are now less interested in “badges” and more in how some aspects of the ITIL framework and other best practice methodologies can help them become more efficient and introduce their own austerity measures.

There is currently a strong need for practical examples and demonstrable results rather than mere theory. Processes are now being hand-picked and tailored to each individual organisation, which can bring fast results – this can really allow businesses to work more efficiently, reduce losses and downtime and, possibly, leverage more from the tools and resources they already have.

But although each individual organisation needs a different set of best practice processes, tailored to their environment, there some essential must-haves that no company should do without:

1 – Change Management

This is the ‘number one’ essential process to improve your IT service availability. It means changes have to be planned, thought through and the consequence understood before any change, large or small, to the IT Service can take place. This does not mean it has to slow changes down as the process can be tailored to each company’s needs, but it does mean that, in some form, each change is considered before it takes place. This alone means that less mistakes are made, which improves your service availability.

2 – Incident Management

Things break and IT services are no different. What is important is how quickly you can get things back working again when this happens. Incident management allows you to create a process that everyone understands to handle these eventualities and restore your services as quickly as possible. Having people unable to work or access the services they require costs an organisation money, so this is more important than ever now. Having a robust incident management process means that the right resources can quickly be assigned to sort out the issue and make sure that your staff can get back to what you employ them for.

3 – Request Fulfilment

In this world of “just in time” ordering where everyone expects to receive everything they want faster and more cheaply than before, for IT this can present a challenge.  Software licenses and hardware components need to be delivered quickly to enable a customer to do their role or become productive quickly after joining an organisation, but conversely, companies need to control costs and make sure they only order what is required and that they do not have licenses or hardware sitting on the shelf depreciating. Having a good request fulfilment process can ensure this does not happen and also ensures the effective tracking of assets. In combination with a “catalogue” of approved components the user is able to select what they require for their job in the knowledge that IT have already confirmed that it will work with everything else. IT  are happy as they know that new device you just connected to the network is not going to slow everyone down or worse!

4 – Supplier Management

It is important for organisations to keep track of their suppliers: are they doing well? Will they still be around next year ? Are they delivering the service and value my organisation requires? Are we paying for services we no longer need?  A  good Supplier Management process means that you can answer these questions and more. It also allows you to provide your supplier with a roadmap of what your business is doing and so allows them to better support your needs going forward. Managing the relationship proactively means that you should rarely have to resort to any SLA penalties – it’s much better to make sure the situation that could cause the penalty is avoided rather than having to experience the impact that caused it in the first place.

5 – Service Level Management

It is important to know what the business requires from its IT services. Not knowing can either mean that the service delivered is not correctly supporting the business or that the IT service being delivered is actually exceeding what the business requires; both of these can cost an organisation money.

Service level management means that the correct Service Level agreements can be put in place to ensure the IT service meets the business need, but also to ensure that the IT service is not “over engineered” and effectively costing more than required. If you’re paying for a Mini but only receiving a push bike then you will be unhappy, equally why pay for a Ferrari when the Mini is all you need.

In these austere times it might just be the right moment to trade in that Ferrari for a Mini!

David Tuck, Principal Consultant

Brace for the feared double dip: IT planning can maximise mergers and acquisitions

As the business world lies in fear of a double-dip recession, companies are advised to ‘think smart’ and try to find a way to profit from further economic downturn and not to simply aim to survive it. Or, if they are struggling, to have a ‘rescue plan’ in place that will spare them from drowning in debt or sinking altogether. As a consequence, mergers and acquisitions flourish remarkably in times of financial difficulties, and can be a way to gain during a tough spell – either by buying or joining with another business and expanding or by selling up before collapsing completely.

Mergers and acquisitions, however, are not just the ‘combining of commercial companies into one’ (to quote the mini Oxford dictionary). Business leaders are missing a significant trick if the joining of two businesses is not maximised, i.e. that the market share of the new entity is greater than the sum of the two companies when operating on their own.

It is, however, an ever repeating trend that mergers and acquisitions do not address operational, cultural and technology considerations as part of the consolidation. These often remain ‘off the radar’ long after the legal part of the merger or acquisition is complete.

So, rather than just ‘think smart’, a better message is perhaps for companies to ‘think smarter’ during tight times and to make the most of these mergers and acquisitions right from the start, by ensuring that the fabric of the new bigger company is appropriately adapted so that it functions in a manner that maximises the now greater trading capabilities.

Those within the IT services industry will have experienced customer organisations that bear the signs of a merger or acquisition and, worst still, continue to tolerate them. The tell-tale signs are classic and include: performance issues; geographically separate and siloed support teams; a large list of supported applications; technical complexities; a high support staff headcount; a disproportionate number of managers; and complex organisational structures. None of these ‘features’ of an organisation can positively contribute to its on-going ability to compete and win in its market place. And if the cost of these inefficiencies could be demonstrated, senior management might just fall off their chairs.

The good news is that mergers and acquisitions can be conducted with a better overall outcome at low cost – through the use of some external aid. These are the kind of projects where the use of a consultancy can really make a difference. Employed during and soon after the merger to improve what is at heart of an improved approach to mergers and acquisitions, ‘people, process and technology’, the cost of a consultant will be a drop in the ocean compared with the overall cost of trying to fix all the possible IT-related faults and issues in the years following the merger or acquisition. The value of the work is likely to be recovered quickly by enabling the business to operate better and by making people’s working practices more efficient. Efficiencies will emerge during the analysis stage of consultancy by identifying opportunities for synergy which will have a positive impact on the on-going investment made by the business in people and systems. The outcome: doing more and doing it better, with less.

So far, all this sounds obvious and nothing more than common sense – so why is it that the ‘people, process and technology’ side of mergers and acquisitions isn’t dealt with early on? Speed, assumption and procrastination are usually the causes.

‘Speed’, because a merger or acquisition deal is usually time sensitive, and focus must be on closing the deal by a given date. ‘Assumption’ because aspects like company culture, people, processes and technology are assumed to be similar and therefore likely to gel. ‘Procrastination’ because activities required to streamline the new business are often planned post-deal, but with human nature being what it is, the plans take an age to implement or never happen at all.

So, if like the United States Army you want to ‘be all you can be’, it is important that people, processes and technology are properly considered and addressed as part of a possible merger or acquisition. You should ensure the IT planning and transformation work starts during the merger/acquisition process so that its importance is clear and understood, then follow it through post-deal before your people return to their normal mode of operation and their old working ways. And, if you are using a service provider for any or all of these steps, be sure to choose one that has a record for properly identifying synergies and efficiencies and who have successfully implemented these. As the recession will not be worsened by losses caused by a faulty or inefficient IT service, the outcome of a well-planned IT merge will surely make the difference.

 

Jon Reeve, Principal Consultant

ITIL 2011: Continual Service Improvement or just the result of V3 being rushed?

The more pessimistic of us would say that the development of ITIL V3 must have been rushed to have missed some of its more beneficial “Best Practice” rules in the transition. After 4 years the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) are updating it to ‘resolve errors and inconsistencies in the text and diagrams and review processes to make training and understanding easier’. It is not out of order to ask ourselves a few questions such as: did they not peer review or audit the publications before going to print, then? Has it really taken them that long to read it all?

In any case, since the 29^th July 2011 new ITIL 2011 edition books have been available to purchase. They will:

• Resolve any errors or inconsistencies in the text and diagrams, both in content and presentation.
• Improve the publications by addressing issues raised in the Change Control Log, as analysed and recommended by the change advisory board (CAB) and approved by the Cabinet Office, part of HM Government. These are largely to do with clarity, consistency, correctness and completeness.
• Address suggestions for change made by the training community to make ITIL easier to teach.

Ok, so maybe they are genuinely following the Continual Service Improvement model and feedback from training, peers and business leaders has been managed through a formal Change Advisory Board (CAB) to improve content, make ITIL easier to understand and stay tuned to the market – it has been 4 years after all! But we still can’t help but ask if ITIL has lost its original meaning and aim or has it just turned into a mere money machine, cashing in on every update which may not have been necessary if the previous version had not been flawed.

The good news on the back of all of this is that we are assured by the OGC that a free downloadable “Summary of Updates” will be made available and, although new examinations and a training syllabus will be available from 8th August 2011, we will not need to re-qualify as ITIL 2011 is not a new version, just a new edition. ITIL V3 as we know and love it will simply become the ITIL 2007 edition!

Helen Steggall, Senior Service Management Consultant

Where is that ‘cultural change’ which makes ITSM Best Practice effective?

Most organisations nowadays have heard about the benefits of implementing an IT Service Management Best Practice framework, such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (CobiT) or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). More than half have implemented some of the core processes, mainly Incident, Service Desk and Change Management. A good number of them believe the discipline has brought them some benefits, but many are also disappointed that they haven’t achieved the results they were aiming for.

There are two main reasons for this. First of all, as any Service Management professional knows, having all the processes, policies and tools in place is not enough if people fail to adopt them. Achieving cultural change across the organisation, so that staff at all levels understand the need to change, how the processes work and what type of benefits each process can bring to their own individual work and to the business as a whole is the most difficult task in a Service Management Best Practice implementation.

Second, even if an organisation invests in training and awareness sessions, the improvements still need to be assessed over time. The effects of the processes and cultural change cannot be seen immediately or after a few months. Real results may come after 2 or 3 years. However, investing in another traditional maturity assessment is an investment many financially-challenged organisations wouldn’t want to make.

The criteria of maturity assessments carried out by SOCITM or with the ITIL toolkit is limited and not all-encompassing – they focus more on processes adopted ‘on paper’ rather than on the actual efficiency reached. But a number (2/5, 4/5) does not tell them whether they are actually working efficiently or not. And that is what organisations want to know: how efficient are we and what can we do to improve?

To evaluate the results of an IT Service Management Best Practice implementation and its alignment with the organisation’s goals and needs, it is more helpful to carry out a Service Efficiency Review, and to adopt monitoring aids such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Customer Satisfaction Surveys in order to keep a clear view of the situation. But many organisations seem to see Best Practice as a one-off, without truly understanding that its value only exists if the efforts are consistent and if the processes are continuously adapted to the changing times and needs. They take it as if it was self-serving – once implemented it should do all the work by itself, without the need of any human effort.

Cultural change should strongly address these misconceptions, and not just convince people to adopt the processes. But it is not an easy task. Many organisations are reluctant to spend money on what they believe are unnecessary expenses, and it is not simple for Service Management professionals to justify a second efficiency review. Perhaps if consultants offered a follow-up review which provided ‘real-world recommendations’ and which was not just a standard tick-the-boxes assessment of out-of-the-box processes, public sector organisations would be keener to consider doing it. And if the second review was offered at a special price so that it is less of a commitment, more results may be achieved: more organisations would want to do it, and the consultants could benefit from the case studies. But they, too, don’t seem to want to bother – most consultants would rather make the same effort for a new client and get much more money and follow-up work.

From the lack of data on IT Service Management implementations which have remained successful in time, of case studies which can show that a form of cultural change has really taken place and lasted, and from the small number of organisations who have an efficiency review at the end of an implementation or more than once, it is evident that there is little interest on both sides in changing this scenario.

But if efforts are needed on both sides, it is Service Management professionals who should make the first move in order to change things. It is important that consultants manage to reach the higher management, and not only involve those who work within IT, and change first of all their attitude towards Service Management Best Practice. It is ultimately up the C-executives and senior managers to encourage cultural change across the organisation, acting from the top with policies and agreed ethos to make change possible. That is why awareness sessions, training and software-lead experiential learning should be extended to higher management as well. Through these tools it is possible to deliver a true understanding of Best Practice and its benefits to the organisation, and hence justify all the efforts needed to reach the final aims of the discipline.

A lot of work needs to be done in order to allow for IT Service Management Best Practice effectiveness to be measured and demonstrated. Fortunately, more and more organisations understand the potential benefits of Best Practice to their business – their concern is the realistic delivery of its promise and how to maintain the results over time. To change the way both organisations and consultants think, both sides need to modify their attitude. Only this way, it may be possible for Best Practice to really deliver and, ultimately, for cultural change to take place.

 

 

Martin Hill, Head of Support Operations

ITIL V3 – should you bother?

With the retirement of version 2 of ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, organisations across all sectors are considering the implications of this change and whether they should think about a possible move to version 3. A reoccurring question is about not just the value of moving towards a V3 aligned approach, but also querying the overall value of the ITIL discipline itself.

There are many doubts regarding the Good Practice framework which is one of the most widely adopted worldwide, and it is not only the CEOs and financial directors who question its effectiveness, ROI and ability to deliver – even many CIOs, IT directors and unfortunately, in some instances, service management professionals themselves have started to look at ITIL with scepticism.

In this current climate of austerity, organisations are being extra cautious regarding their spending. This is leading both those who are considering the step up from V2 and those considering whether to start on the service management journey to wonder: what can V3 possibly add, and isn’t ITIL overrated anyway?

Let’s take the last question first. Like a lot of challenges within business, rather than deciding on a solution and then trying to relate everything back to it, look at what overall objective is and which issues need to be resolved. ITIL, which ever version you choose, is not a panacea. It won’t fix everything, but it may be able to help if you take a pragmatic and realistic approach to activities.

ITIL’s approach to implementation in the early days was described as “adopt and adapt” – an approach that still rings true even with V3. However, this appears to have fallen out of the vocabulary recently. Adopting all processes regardless of their relevance to the business and following them religiously will not add any value. Nor will implementing them without ensuring that there is awareness and buy-in across the organisation; treating implementation as a one-off project rather than a continuously evolving process or expecting the discipline to work on its without positioning it alongside the existing behaviours, culture, processes and structure in the organisation.

ITIL’s contribution to an organisation is akin to raising children, where one asks oneself: is it nature or nurture that creates the well rounded individuals, and what parenting skills work best? You need to find the most compatible match, one that will in part depend on what that particular business wants from a Best Practice framework and if they really understand how it works. Do they want to be told what to do or find out what works and what doesn’t and why, so they can learn from it?

All activities in a Best Practice framework have to be carefully selected and tailored in order to create some value. Moreover, adoption of tools and processes must be supported by an appropriate amount of education and awareness sessions, so that any involved staff, including senior management, will fully understand their purpose, usefulness and benefits and will therefore collaborate in producing successful results.

The other question raised by many organisations is: why should I move to V3 – isn’t V2 perfectly fine? It is hard to come up with a perfect answer as there are a number of considerations to take into consideration, but in part it can come back to what the overall objective was for the business. Looking at the move from V2 to V3 as an evolution, a number of the key principles expanded on in V3 exist with V2, so there will be some organisations for whom the expanded areas relating to IT strategy and service transition are not core to their IT operation. However, the separation of request fulfilment from incident management and the focus on event management may lead an organisation to alter the way they deal with the day-to-day activity triggers into the IT department.

My personal view is that anything that helps organisations to communicate more effectively is a benefit. V3 provides more suggestions that can help with these objectives, as well as helping the IT department to operate with more of a service oriented approach, again something that can help cross the language gap between technology and business. V3 provides a lifecycle approach to IT service, recommending continual review and improvement at organisation level.

So, is V3 essential if you have already successfully adopted and adapted V2? For organisations that do not require maximum IT efficiency because IT is not strategic, V2 is probably enough to keep them doing well. For those that, instead, gain real competitive advantage from efficient IT, any improvement that can make their business outperform others in the market is one worth embracing.

As for all the organisations in the middle, a move to V3 is probably not essential in the immediate future – however, as publications and examinations are substituted to match the latest version, and the way in which their suppliers are providing service changes, it will soon become a necessary thing to do in order to keep up-to-date and in turn competitive within the market.

Samantha-Jane Scales, Senior Service Management consultant and ITSM Portal columnist

Find the column on ITSM Portal:  http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/itil-v3-%E2%80%93-should-you-bother

Seeing life through ITIL’s lens

Does a Service Management professional’s brain never stop seeing ‘incidents’ and ‘problems’ around them?

On my way to the itSMF conference in rainy London, I saw a woman trip on wet marble as she entered the tube station. As she fell to the floor on her backside I automatically thought: ‘This could have been easily avoided with Proactive Problem Management!’

In fact, tripping-on-wet-marble can be seen as a ‘known error’ since it has happened before and continues to happen over and over every time it rains, and would be easily resolved by placing a sufficient number of anti-slip rubber mats right at the entrance, where the floor is wet and slippery.

Is it just me who sees life applications for ITIL principles?

 

Samantha-Jane Scales, Senior Service Management consultant

Saving ITIL – how to protect the reputation of Best Practice frameworks

Since the news came out that the Office of Government Commerce stated in a report by the Office of Public Sector Information they had ‘no policy remit’ to produce and develop the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology, various articles and blogs have been written declaring the ‘death of ITIL’, or at least of the discipline as we know it.

This has been interpreted by some as an intention to drop official support due to lack of interest, since ITIL is admittedly not one of the OGC’s core responsibilities. Critics believe the move will make ITIL an even more lucrative money machine for vendors and service providers which may end in self-sabotage. Most opponents have focused their editorials on the consequences of this move on the Best Practice framework’s quality and credibility, or have taken this as an occasion to declare that ITIL is already overrated and over-praised.

Those who welcome the change, instead, believe it would be a good thing for ITIL to be free, open and available to all. However, there seems to be little analysis of what the choice made by the OGC might mean, the pros and cons of a liberated Best Practice framework and, ultimately, hardly any propositions on how to save the framework’s reputation.

Taking into account such pros and cons, it is difficult to have a clear opinion on thesituation. There can definitely be some benefits in liberating a framework – for instance, it creates an opportunity for professionals to provide recommendations and contribute with ideas and innovations which derive from their personal experience. They are able to interact more comprehensively with the discipline, allowing it to grow, improve and change with the market and the various business environments it operates in.

But labels like ‘ITIL’ – which have become brand names – are often used as a sales tool to sell books, memos and software, and by making it even more commercial the risk is that the discipline will lose its authority. Let’s take Neuro-Linguistic Programming as an example. As there is no regulation, people are free to say that they are NLP practitioners although they are only recognised within their own training company, and their methodology may be different from practitioners who come from another company. There is no official recognition of what is good and bad practice in NLP, therefore it may not be felt as a discipline one can rely on alone.

So if any consultancy, training company, book author and software vendor was able to say that their product or service is ‘ITIL aligned’, although it complies with their version of ITIL which might be different from another one, then it would be impossible to have some measurable quality standards that can be used to evaluate and choose. If you take away standardisation and consistency, if there isn’t a strong and consistent identity or an independent body that can set standards, the framework will practically cease to exist.

To reassure readers, the ambiguous OPSI report does not state that the OGC has no interest in ITIL and, in fact, it still owns copyright on the product. The information on the report might mean that the body will outsource development but will still have the last word on content and the power to approve a product or service. If this is the case, then the situation might prove ideal for the reasons stated above, balancing the pros and cons in a safer scenario.

But this is not the main problem with Best Practice frameworks, it seems. An example of one that is not supported by an official body but is still popular and widely used is the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). Although it is free and available to everybody, it doesn’t appear to be very different from ITIL in its recognition, methodology and principles. Nevertheless, it appears to have the same issues that consultants see in ITIL as it is – there is a lot of emphasis on gap-fill documents and selling books rather than in delivering a thorough understanding of the processes and aims. Unless the professional who downloads the templates and fills the gaps understands the content and context of what they are doing, it has little value and probably little effectiveness. It is apparent, then, that freeing the discipline doesn’t solve the issues behind Best Practice frameworks, nor does keeping control over it.

Perhaps the problem is not about ITIL being endorsed by an official body or not, but rather how to enhance the reputation and effectiveness of Best Practice frameworks. Disciplines such as ITIL and MOF need to find a way to overcome their credibility issues, cease to be mere money machines and become what they are supposed to be – guidelines for carrying out operations in the best possible way to reach efficiencies and cost savings. Only if Service Management professionals start believing in the ‘wider aims’ and practicing the discipline with a thorough understanding of what is being done, will it be possible for such frameworks to regain trust and, ultimately, to really deliver results.

Samantha-Jane Scales, Service Management consultant

Find this column on ITSM Portal: http://www.itsmportal.com/columns/saving-itil-%E2%80%93-how-protect-reputation-best-practice-frameworks

Life after ITIL – creating a culture of Continual Service Improvement

Picture the scene: your organisation has decided to improve its IT department through the introduction of ITIL Best Practice. Some external consultants from an IT service provider came in to do a review and mapped out the project. They then implemented the agreed Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes while delivering awareness sessions to various members of staff. Perhaps you even got a few of your people v3 qualified. At last, your Best Practice project has been delivered and has finally gone live. But what now?

The Service Management experts are long gone and you find yourself alone in managing the improved environment. Things somehow seem to be slowly regressing to their previous state – as if the project never happened. But how can such a promising project prove so ineffective?

Unfortunately, many organisations don’t seem to truly realize that Best Practice is not a one-off implementation, nor is it self-sustaining. As Version 3 of ITIL underlines, there should be an iterative and interactive lifecycle approach to the various processes. Best Practice is an ongoing commitment, and not a time-restricted project.  It’s essential to continually revise, reassess, and improve the people, processes and technology in order to produce real benefits, especially in the long term. To do this, several elements must be taken into consideration – post-implementation support from service providers, ownership within the organisation and understanding and commitment of staff at all levels.

Post-implementation support

It is undeniably important that the consultants who have implemented the processes make themselves available for further support, to embed the discipline in the organisation. The service provider should come back regularly after the project has gone live to see if the new ways of working have been adopted across people, process and technology, and to help the organisation find ways of measuring the effects, evaluating the benefits and identifying the areas for improvement. But it’s not only up to the consultants to drive through improvements and focus the internal efforts. Ultimately, they will have to hand over ownership and responsibility to the client.

Commitment of staff

It is essential then that the people, processes, and technology in the environment are subject to Continual Service Improvement: the discipline must be understood, accepted, structured and well supported by senior management as well as staff at all levels. CSI is the wrap that allows all other processes to maintain their effectiveness, through ongoing reviews aimed at identifying inefficiencies followed by improvement actions. Actually, the CSI process itself must be continually evaluated and adapted to remain relevant, up-to-date and constantly aligned to the IT and the business objectives.

Senior management buy-in

Senior management, on the other hand, has to really understand the value of ITIL and be able to deal with any resistance to change found across the organisation. They have to ensure that the various members of staff at the tactical and operational levels understand how the new processes, technologies, and roles will affect the way they work. They have to clarify what efficiencies can be achieved not only by the organisation, but in the individuals’ everyday work as well.

For many people, change means stepping out of their comfort zone. Many are wary of, or simply not interested, in doing that. Communication is therefore essential: employees need to be shown the changes and benefits concretely and clearly, perhaps through awareness or experiential learning sessions. Management has to be able to justify the importance and usefulness of changes and how ITIL can support and deliver efficiencies. If this isn’t possible, then the project alone cannot produce the desired effects. If people don’t understand the need to change and don’t adopt the new processes and tools, the organisation will not reach what it aims to achieve and in some cases, may even go back to the previous state.

It’s the people across the organisation that will ultimately determine whether the ethos of CSI will be embedded. The key to making ITIL a framework that adds value and not just a nice-to-have is not solely in the technology or the processes, but the cultural change produced across the organisation.

It’s through regular assessment and review that the benefits of ITIL can be realized. To ultimately create a shared culture of Continual Service Improvement, management has to take ownership and highlight the benefits of change.

Steve Connelly, Head of Service Management

This article is featured on Tech Republic: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=4106

Are you Off-Sure about your IT Service Desk?

No matter the economic climate, or indeed within which industry they operate, organisations are constantly seeking to lower the cost of IT while also trying to improve performance. The problem is it can often seem impossible to achieve one without compromising on the other and in most cases, cost cutting will take prevalence, leading to a dip in service levels.

When things get tough the popularity of off-shoring inevitably increases, leading many decision-makers to consider sending the IT Service Desk off to India, China or Chile as a convenient solution financially – low-cost labour for high-level skills is how offshore service providers are advertising the service.

In reality things are not so straightforward. The primary reason for off-shoring is to reduce costs, but according to experts average cost savings only tend to lie between 10-15%, and what is more, additional costs can be created – research shows, in fact, that they can in some cases increase by 25%.

Hidden costs, cultural differences and low customer and user satisfaction are reasons which have made nearly 40% of UK companies surveyed by the NCC Evaluation Centre change their mind and either reverse the move – a phenomenon known as ‘back-shoring’ or ‘reverse off-shoring’ – or think about doing so in the near future. Once an organisation decides to reverse the decision, however, the process is not trouble-free. Of those who have taken services back in-house, 30% say they have found it ‘difficult’ and nearly half, 49%, ‘moderately difficult’. Disruptions and inefficiencies often lead to business loss, loss of client base and, more importantly, a loss of reputation – it is in fact always the client and not the provider which suffers the most damage in this sense.

Data security is another great concern in off-shoring. An ITV news programme recently uncovered a market for data stolen at offshore service providers: bank details and medical information could be easily bought for only a few pounds, often just from call centre workers. Of course information security breaches can happen even in-house, caused by internal staff; however, in off-shoring the risk is increased by the distance and the different culture and law which exist abroad.

Not a decision to be taken lightly, then. Organisations should realise that the IT Service Desk is a vital business tool and while outsourcing has its advantages, if they do it by off-shoring they are placing the face of their IT system on the other side of the planet, and in the hands of a provider that might not have the same business culture, ethics and regulations as they do.

So before thinking about off-shoring part or the whole IT department, organisations would be wise to take the time to think about why their IT is so expensive and what they could do to improve it, cutting down on costs without affecting quality, efficiency and security and moreover, not even having to move it from its existing location.

Here are some measures organisations could take in order to improve efficiency in the IT Service Desk while at the same time reducing costs:

Best practice implementation

Adoption of Best Practice is designed to make operations faster and more efficient, reducing downtime and preserving business continuity. The most common Best Practice in the UK is ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) which is divided into different disciplines – Change Management, Risk Management, Incident Management to name but a few.

ITIL processes can be seen as a guide to help organisations plan the most efficient routes when dealing with different types of issues, from everyday standard operations and common incidents up to rarer events and even emergencies.

Whilst incident management seems to be easily recognised as a useful tool, other applications of ITIL are unfairly seen by many as a nice to have. But implementing best practice processes to deal with change management, for example, is particularly important: if changes are carried out in a random way they can cause disruptions and inefficiencies, and when a user cannot access resources or has limited use of important tools to carry out their work, business loss can occur – and not without cost.

Every minute of downtime is a minute of unpaid work, but costs can also extend to customer relationship and perhaps loss of client base if the inefficiencies are frequent or very severe.

Realignment of roles within the Service Desk

With Best Practice in place, attention turns to the set-up of resources on the Service Desk. A survey conducted by Plan-Net showed that the average IT Service Desk is composed of 35% first-line analysts, 48% second line and 17% third line. According to Gartner statistics, the average first-line fix costs between £7 and £25 whereas second line fixes normally vary from £24 to £170. Second and third line technicians have more specific skills, therefore their salaries are much higher than the ones of first line engineers; however, most incidents do not require such specific skills or even physical presence.

An efficient Service Desk will be able to resolve 70% of their calls remotely at first line level, reducing the need for face-to-face interventions by second line engineers. The perception of many within IT is that users prefer a face-to-face approach to a phone call or interaction with a machine, but in reality the culture is starting to change thanks to efficiency acquiring more importance within the business. With second-line fix costing up to 600% more, it is better to invest in a Service Desk that hits a 70% rate of first-time fix, users for the most part will be satisfied that their issues are fixed promptly and the business will go along way to seeing the holy grail of reduced costs and improved performance simultaneously.

From a recent survey carried out by Forrester for TeamQuest Corporation, it appears that 50% of organisations normally use two to five people to resolve a performance issue, and 35% of the participants are not able to resolve up to 75% of their application performance issues within 24 hours. Once you calculate the cost of number of staff involved multiplied by number of hours to fix the incident, it is not difficult to see where the costly problem lies. An efficient solution will allow IT to do more with less people, and faster.

Upskilling and Service Management toolset selection

Statistics show that the wider adoption of Best Practice processes and the arrival of new technologies are causing realignments of roles within the Service Desk. In many cases this also involves changes to the roles themselves, as the increased use of automated tools and virtualised solutions mean more complex fixes can be conducted remotely and at the first line. As this happens first line engineers will be required to have a broader knowledgebase and be able to deal with more issues without passing them on.

With all these advancements leading to a Service Desk that requires less resource (and therefore commands less cost) while driving up fix rates and therefore reducing downtime it seems less and less sensible for organisations to accept off-shore outsourcing contracts with Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) that guarantee a first-time fix rate of as little as 20% or 30% for a diminished price. It seems the popularity of such models lies only in organisations not being aware that quality and efficiency are something they can indeed afford – without the risk of off-shoring.

The adoption of a better toolset and the upskilling of first-line analysts, especially through ITIL-related training, will help cut down on costs and undoubtedly improve service levels. However while it will also remove the necessity to have a large amount of personnel, especially at higher level, the issues with finding, recruiting and training resource will still involve all the traditional headaches IT Managers have always faced. With this in mind it can often be prudent to engage with a service provider and have a co-sourced or managed desk that remains in-house and under internal management control. Personnel selected by an expert provider will have all the up-to-date skills necessary for the roles required, and only the exact number needed will be provided, while none of the risks associated with wholesale outsourcing, or worse, off-shoring, are taken.

Improving IT infrastructure and enhancing security

Improving efficiencies in IT does not begin and end with the Service Desk of course. The platform on which your organisation sits, the IT infrastructure itself, is of equal importance in terms of both cost and performance – and crucially, is something that cannot be influenced by off-shoring. For example, investing in server virtualisation can make substantial cost savings in the medium to long term. Primarily this arises from energy saving but costs can also be cut in relation to space and building and maintenance of physical servers, not to mention the added green credentials. Increased business continuity is another advantage: virtualisation can minimise disruptions and inefficiencies, therefore reducing downtime – probably the quickest way to make this aspect of IT more efficient in the short, medium and long term.

Alongside the myriad of new technologies aimed squarely at improving efficiency and performance sits the issue of Information Security. With Data Protection laws getting tougher due to the new 2010 regulations, forcing private companies to declare any breaches to the Information Commissioner who has the right to make them public, and facing them with fines up to £500,000, security is becoming even more of an unavoidable cost than ever. Increased awareness is needed across the entire organisation as data security is not only the concern of the IT department, but applicable to all personnel at all levels. The first step in the right direction is having a thorough security review and gap analysis in order to assess compliance with ISO 27001 standards and study any weak points where a breach can occur. Then workshops are needed to train non-IT staff on how to deal with data protection. Management participation is particularly important in order to get the message across that data safety is vital to an organisation.

Taking a holistic view of IT

Whatever the area of IT under scrutiny, the use of external consultancies and service providers to provide assistance is often essential. That said, it is rare to find an occasion where moving IT away from the heart of the business results in improvements. The crucial element to consider then is balance. Many organisations, as predicted by Gartner at the beginning of this year, are investing in operational rather than capital expenditure as they begin to understand that adoption of the latest tools and assets is useless without a holistic view of IT. When taking this methodology and applying it to the Service Desk it soon becomes apparent that simply by applying a Best Practice approach to an internal desk and utilising the new technologies at your disposal, the quick-fix cost benefits of off-shoring soon become untenable.

Pete Canavan, Head of Support Services

This article is featured in the current issue of ServiceTalk

Is your IT Service Desk future proof?

Organisations across all sectors have more than realised that the unstable economic climate has brought along an increased need for flexible solutions, not only in the case of downsizing but in upsizing the business as well. While some companies are still struggling with budget cuts, others are looking at growth or re-expansion in the near future; regardless, both have reason to consider an improvement of their IT Service Desk with the help of the right service management solutions, in order to obtain a number of efficiencies. An efficient service desk can reduce IT-related costs, improve customer satisfaction and make business operations smooth and responsive – however, these outcomes cannot be reached by using an off-the-shelf solution which is only fit for present conditions. Organisations should adopt a solution that can remain solid and efficient both in the case of downsizing and cutbacks due to a recession, and as it replicates and extends to a new business dimension in the medium term as the company grows, something everyone is wishing for now that the economy seems to be slowly recovering.

As Best Practice identifies, people, processes and technology are all factors that need to be looked at and adjusted in order to obtain an IT Service Desk which is both flexible and scalable, and if the desk is or is to be managed by a third party contracts with service providers need to be seriously scrutinised to ensure they provide the organisation with a solution which is scalable regardless of the economic climate.

With regard to toolsets, although it might be cheaper to purchase a standard, fixed, one-size-fits-all solution, this might bring along extra costs in the long run if it does not allow easy amendments or any at all. You may be surviving with a tool which currently has limited functionality; however, what happens when the user base grows or the Services offered expand and the system has no ability to be adapted or requires extensive and costly professional services to deliver changes? These software solutions should be chosen and implemented keeping scalability in mind – they should not only be fit-for-business and ITIL-aligned, but fit-for-growth as well. It is important to immediately assess if a tool allows that sort of flexibility and, moreover, if there are the appropriate skills within the organisation to carry out any adaptation. All service management tools within the market place are aligned to Best Practice – they have to be, otherwise they cannot compete. However, some are more aligned than others. Any organisation considering selection should be clear about their specific requirements and their internal capabilities for development of the toolset moving forward and thus provide agility and alignment to the specific needs of that organisation, both today and in the future.

As for the process side of things, Best Practice in itself does not represent a barrier to flexibility; on the contrary, when correctly applied, it offers the means to carry out all operations smoothly and allow the business to up and downsize in the most efficient way. With a mature level of Change Management in place, as well as a good understanding of availability and capacity management, any alteration to business and IT dimension will be accomplished without causing significant disruptions and inefficiencies, which can cause problems such as data and financial loss, low customer satisfaction and poor credibility in the market. The trick is treating the Service Desk exactly as you would treat infrastructure, adapting processes that you could apply for instance to a server that needs to undergo some changes to the whole Service Desk.

For what concerns staffing, in-house or outsourced, if downsizing can present contractual issues that can slow down the process or make it more difficult and not really cost-efficient (from redundancy processes to TUPE or any financial binds resulting from contracts with providers), upsizing might present challenges as well. For a company with an internally managed Service Desk, defining contracts, finding the right skills and training personnel results in a significant investment of time and money. If the organisation is growing quickly, might be a lag regardless of personnel being in-house or outsourced: it might take some time to find the right candidates who are appropriately skilled, especially if they are required to hold a specific qualification such as the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer); if the organisation chooses to employ staff with lower skills, it might take some time to train them and get them to the desired level, not to mention it might cost as much as hiring staff with higher skills. It is becoming more prevalent to utilise a specialist third party and therefore delegate the responsibility and hassle, as they often have access to a wider pool of competent workers or have ‘floating’ staff readily available for the purpose, but it is important to stipulate a contract beforehand that makes it clear if immediate availability is a priority over skills, whether the client is required to pay for training when it is necessary, and how flexible the supplier is in regards to number of personnel – is it possible to lose ten analysts or acquire another ten without fines or surcharge and within a reasonable time frame? One challenge facing a lot of organisations as we climb out of the recession is the extension of Service hours at no or minimal extra cost as the business strive to deliver increased flexibility to their customers and distinguish themselves from their competitors.

On top of all this, to obtain successful resizing of the IT Service Desk it is essential that there is a good communication flow between the business and IT. It is in fact only through working together and with a holistic mind-frame that the IT Service Desk is able to move from being just a tactical tool to acquiring a strategic function that can create business value, and be active part in an organisation’s ride to success.

 

 

Pete Canavan, Head of Support Services

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