Down to business… For our cover story this issue I spoke to Adam Maurice, founder and managing director of outsource IT Service Management company The Internet Group. He told me how his company has had to ‘shift up a gear’ to gain ITIL and SDI accreditation demanded by the middle market. One thing that amazed me was that Maurice started the company while he was still at school in 1999 – he is now 28. Thinking back to my somewhat more distant youth, I remember a few of my friends and acquaintances attempting to start their own ‘computer’ businesses, attempting to sell games for their BBC Model Bs, Sinclair Spectrums and Dragons and while for many this lead on to degrees in computing or electronics, most never went the distance. For more information on Adam’s background see The Secret Of My Success on page 64.

As I have mentioned in my new Editor’s Blog (www.vital-mag.net/category/editors-blog/) on the VitAL website, I was saddened to hear about the untimely death of Steve jobs. With his passing I can’t help thinking that one of the true geniuses, risk-takers and original thinkers of the IT industry has departed and will be sadly missed. The newspapers have been saying that Jobs left plans and instructions which will keep Apple in innovative new products and concepts for some time to come, but his absence will leave a void in the industry. I suspect we won’t see his like again for some time.

Another innovation on the VitAL website is the Jobs Board (www.vital-mag.net/category/jobs-2/), this has nothing obvious to do with the erstwhile chief executive of Apple, it is in fact your first port of call if you are on the hunt for a new position in the Service management or wider IT sector. Check it out.

Until next time…

Matt Bailey

Editor

The downgrading of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ had a huge (some might argue unprecedented) effect on trading volumes in the few days following. It could be considered as a change in environment (Cretaceous -Tertiary extinction event?) where only the fittest could survive. Some companies had near death experiences. Of the two separate instances that came to my attention, the ultimate root causes were the same.

In one, on Monday someone realised that they were going to run out of space by Friday on a disk array, and that more space would be required otherwise they would not be open to trade. They alerted the people who make the budgets available. They did so on Tuesday as well. .. and on Wednesday. On Thursday they added the very last hot-spare drive to the pool, and deleted all the things on the array which were deemed not to be mission critical. On Friday, they did open for trade, and the hardware arrived during the day.

In another, they had a certain capacity for trade volumes, and due to the high number of trades, and market volatility driving some unusual client behaviour in their systems they ran out of resources before the end of the trading day.

The root causes in both instances were the same; when it came to cutting costs (making people redundant), both institutions have leaned heavily on their IT departments to make the cuts. Neither businesses reduced by an equal percentage the trading staff, nor the customers that they handle – that would, of course be madness; to reduce the number of people in a business who can be singled out as ‘making money’ would be unthinkable. The focus of the staff reductions and budget reductions was on the support organisations. And one of the obvious roles to cut and not focus on replacing was Capacity Managers – after all, what good is a Capacity Manager in a crisis?

This imbalance in headcount reduction results in ‘Organisational Diabetes’, where the internal imbalances between trading and support lead the organisation to firstly go blind, so it cannot see into the future properly, and then begin to lose nerve feeling, so it does not know that there are problems with the core systems until it’s either just in time late (survivable with a panic), or too late. As a reaction to the reductions in budget, organisations have to do more with fewer resources, and there is a temptation to rearrange, restructure and mess with the internal IT support organisation to attempt to continue to cover all the functions, but now only part-time for each role – and this can further unsettle the individuals, leading in some cases to ill-health and worse.

This is a choice that some financial services companies are making – to lean on the IT support departments until they break – because the first sign of having cut too far can be a series of Near Death Experiences, and they should be a sign to the Board that they have trimmed support too far.

By the time this issue of VitAL is distributed, either the Greeks have or have not (yet) defaulted. The financial regulators have taken some infrastructure suppliers to one side and asked them to prepare for a 60 percent increase in trading volumes above the recent maximums reached. Some under-resourced and over-tightened IT infrastructures may be barely able to cope with the volume of trade.

At a previous place of work we made some t-shirts up, simply saying ‘I’d rather be shoveling in the boiler-room of the Titanic’.

You can now contact Steve White at: stevescolumn@vital-mag.net

Having a backlog of outstanding support jobs is not uncommon. In fact, it is almost necessary to have some backlog in order to guarantee a smooth flow of work through the support group and maximise return on resources investment. But when the backlog starts to contain, or even be dominated by work that is impeding user productivity, then you have a major problem.

Clear your backlog. It can be done – two recent clients of mine have both brought their backlogs down to a small fraction of what they were, shifting the bulk of the problem in less than a fortnight. And we’re talking call backlogs numbering in the hundreds here.

Is it real?

First thing to find out is whether it really is a backlog. There are two dimensions here, one being job ownership and the other your own staff’s productivity. Make sure all calls are owned, that is that named members of the support service are assigned to be the next person to make a difference to the state of each enquiry. If it’s not owned, nothing will happen with it. Be also aware whether the next person to take action is supposed to be the user. If it is, first stop the service-level clock – you are not to be judged on work you cannot influence. Next send an email to remind the user that you are waiting for him. Thereafter, a lack of reply means the issue is not pressing the user, so it is likely to have little business impact and it can be closed because it is not real.

On the question of productivity, I have a rule of thumb. If a hypothetical ten percent increase in your query-solving productivity over a week would be greater than the backlog, then you don’t have a backlog programme – but you may well have a productivity problem. You must measure the productivity of your staff. It is unavoidable. There is a quantity of work coming in, a quantity of resource available to meet it and so a quantity of resolutions going out. These are quantities – they must be matched together, which means that as a manager, it is your duty to do that matching. If you do not measure staff productivity now, give it a try – the politics and suspicions may have to be dealt with first, but the effects can be magical.

Why you must clear it

The main reasons for clearing the backlog are the effect of its maintenance on staff, the impact on service overall and the cost of keeping the backlog.

If yours is like most support desks, its backlog will most probably be demoralising your staff. Every morning, they are faced with this mountain of work, and still the phone keeps ringing. It can take away the point of providing a good service. Clear your backlog so your people can start enjoying their job again.

And what about you, the manager? How does this backlog make you look to your people, when you don’t appear to be doing anything about it? Clear your backlog to show you have not lost control.

Even though the backlog persists, your people still want to deliver a good service. They still want to demonstrate that they are doing their best. Trouble is, that very laudable desire gets perverted by the backlog. The staff start to cherry-pick – clearing the calls they can, or will enjoy doing, partly to claw some job satisfaction from this execrable situation, partly to keep their numbers up. The result is that the easy calls get cleared, the difficult ones get missed, avoided or just plain forgotten. And it may be the difficult problems which are causing all the damage. Clear your backlog to stop the erosion of service.

Backlogs cost money. An outstanding user problem means a user has lost productivity. You can define productivity as a user’s contribution to corporate turnover, and you can calculate that out by the hour. The age of your backlog in working hours, multiplied by the number of users affected, then by the sum of user productivity per hour, finally by their proportional dependence on Information Technology will give you a cash figure. That number may scare the living daylights out of you. Clear your backlog to save money.

How to clear it

You could close the support desk; although not during working hours. No incoming work means no interruptions to the task of producing outgoing completions. One client of mine has started a phase of planned overtime to clear their backlog. Of course, users can’t be contacted during overtime, but at least the research and diagnosis can be done without telephone interruptions – until, that is, that word gets around the building that the service desk is populated tonight, so it’s OK to work late.

Another idea is to set up an action team, drawn from each of the walks of the support-involved sections of the IT department. One of the preconditions might be that all non-urgent project work stops, right now, until the backlog is cleared. That’s also a partial incentive, and I know a couple of IT services managers who have offered that and other more bankable incentives to get the backlog cleared.

The first thing the support manager has to do is insist on it being cleared, expressively, consistently, continually. Tighten up your management of service priorities and output. OK, perhaps you’ll be seen as an ogre for a month, but needs must, for everybody’s benefit. Put some pressure on your team leaders, show it matters, show you care, and remember to congratulate and reward success. I’m sure the Raj Tandoori in town can seat all two dozen of you, if you book in advance.

Daily measurement meetings work. Every morning, no more than twenty minutes. What did Networks Section achieve yesterday? What target is Applications Support setting itself for tomorrow? How can the rest of us help? Well done Installations Group, splendid effort. Tech Services, how is your clearance strategy developing?

The backlog itself

Get yourself a strategy. Examine the queue, and yes, that means reading every outstanding problem, even though that might be excruciatingly embarrassing. You’ll look at some of these and think, how the blazes did that one get missed? Never mind, it did, it’s history, get on with it.

Prioritise the jobs. There are some in there that should not have come to you in the first place. There are some that have gone nuclear by now, so the user is probably chasing other users, vendors, anybody to get some progress.

Close anything which is actually dead. There are some calls in their which have become irrelevant, because the software version has changed, or the user has retired, been promoted or left. Oh, yes. I’ve seen plenty of backlogs with calls going back over two years. Your staff may have been avoiding contacting those users because of the embarrassment of having to begin a telephone conversation with the line “you remember that call you logged with us a year ago last February?”

If it’s dead, kill it. Send out Emails to the appropriate users telling them what you are doing and why you are doing it. And if they ask you to “keep the call open”, refuse. If you cannot influence a problem (Eg if it is intermittent), then don’t claim you can. You know the sort of call – the computer did something funny one day, so the user wants you to keep the call open just in case it does it again. There’s no point in keeping a job like that open, not least on the principle that you cannot influence it, so it should not be in your in-tray. Forget it – technology moves too fast, there will be a new version of the software soon that will probably fix the bug anyway.

For severe backlogs, insist on plans for clearance. That might mean going down to some detail, involving calculating the man-hours involved. You’ll have to take into account things like activity time, target time relative to other work, perhaps even going to the lengths of drawing up Gantt charts. Still, with that level of measurement, you’ll know for sure whether you truly do need increased resources, either temporarily or permanently.

But don’t bust a blood vessel over this. You will never get rid of the whole of the backlog, because of the law of diminishing returns. A slight backlog means a regular flow of work, which is efficient as it means your resources are not idling. But so long as you have prioritised the work, the important stuff doesn’t queue unnecessarily and the few outstanding calls that are left are truly low priority, then you can rest easier and give yourself and your willing staff a hefty pat on the back.

The next question is how to prevent the backlog building again – but that’s another article.

Noel Bruton is a UK-based, independent consultant and trainer who since 1991 has advised companies all over the world and in a wide range of industries on the practical realities of IT support improvement. He is the author of the best selling ‘How To Manage the IT Helpdesk’ and ‘Managing the IT Services Process’. See more of his work at http://www.noelbruton.com/.

How many staff do I need in my IT support function? In terms of questions landing in my mailbox, this ranks a close second behind ‘which ITSM software should I use?’ Both questions suggest a false starting point. By illustration – you can’t choose an enquiry management system based on features alone, despite what some of the vendors would have you believe. Much more important is the software’s match to predefined processes. If you know what your processes are, or you’ve simply imported the superficial suggestions made by ITIL, then pretty much any mainstream helpdesk package these days will do the job, because they’re all ‘Pink Verified’ to match ITIL. But you still have to be prepared to customise, because what makes your support work for your user permutation in your industry will probably not match the generic design in the software as it comes out of the box.

Similarly, you can’t define your staffing levels on incoming workload alone, but on support staff productivity, skills mix, skills redundancy, geographical location, centralisation policy, service scope and priorities as dictated by business criticality. Of those, staff productivity is The Big One: get that wrong and your estimates could be out by staff costs in the hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, astonishingly few IT services departments measure their staff’s productivity. And what’s more, the most critical service – second line support – is invariably the least measured. Worryingly, some organisations, notably those in the public sector, seem to have a difficulty measuring staff productivity, or at least selling the idea where the workforce is unionised. It is important to get across to those with misgivings, that without measurement of input versus output, we managers cannot know whether staff are under or overworked, whether there are time opportunities to train them and so on. Productivity measurement is, or should be in their interests too – it is not simply an evil control mechanism, but part of our ‘Duty of Care’.

Key Statistics

So where to start? The simplest place is the numbers. Some years ago, I ran an extensive benchmark of IT user support key statistics, not just to feed them back into the industry, but to arrive at an algorithmic means of informing important decisions like staffing quantities. This summer, that benchmark will run again. In the meantime, this is what the last one produced. If you want to benefit from the new benchmark, contact me via my website, www.noelbruton.com.

We’ll assume your support desk is averagish, supporting between 800 and 1,500 users. We’ll go with 1,000 for the purpose of calculation. If you add together the number of heads in the first and second lines, the benchmark said you’d have one support head to ever 129 users. But how did you get there?

The users will each call you 26 times a year (up to 50 for smaller populations). Yep, that means they stop working because of a computer or usage problem or a change request roughly once a fortnight. Hmm. If the kettle or your car or your telly bade you to seek outside technical help once a fortnight, there’d be rioting in the streets, but with computers, that seems to be acceptable. Nevertheless, over the 250 working days of the year, your 1,000 users will make 104 calls to the helpdesk every day.

Lost Time

Divide that by the average of 32 calls per first liner per day to get a first line headcount of just over three. And you get your first insight into productivity. I’ve been working with a wonderful first line at the moment, which takes over 70 calls per head per day. Like many service desks, their call time is a shade under three minutes. So the average desk is taking enquiries for 1.6 of the 7.5 working hours of the day. But if that’s so, where did the other six hours go? Never mind, you get my drift – the performance of the average helpdesk is an awfully long way from what can be achieved (and how much money can be saved) by a good one.

Your first line will fix 59% of their calls immediately, thus sending 43 enquiries to the second line. Now productivity becomes really important. The average second liner will close eight of those assignments per day (known as the FRA, the ‘Fixes per Resolver Average’), so there will be between five and 6 second line heads. The last time I measured it, the average work time in a second line fix was around 37 minutes. So five hours of productive time per day. You may be wondering where the other two and a half hours a day went. But wait, it gets worse. I know of a second line with FRA of 1.3 – nice work if you can get it.

So add your three first line to your six second line heads and divide that by the industry average staff to manager ratio of 9.5 to give you the number of managers. Hey presto! There are ten people in the support department. There are probably another three looking after the network and email services. Thirteen in total who, on the basis of industry averages, could be a lot more productive than they typically are.

Skills Redundancy

But that’s just numerics. Now it starts to get complicated. For every major service you provide – installations, moves, incident resolutions, applications support and so on – you will need at least one redundant skillset. That’s another way of saying that if somebody doesn’t turn up for work, there will be somebody else with the skills to take on his/her workload. None of this, “Oh I’m sorry, the (insert name of technology here) expert is sick /on a course today”

Depending on the quantity of the calls on business critical services and applications, you may have to hire more staff just to create that skills redundancy. You can calculate how many by something I call the ‘Barber Pole’ – it’s a graph of skillsets by staff based on your most expert people, which is a benchmark for how many skills one person can theoretically be expert in. If there are more skills required than your people’s heads can hold, you’ll need more people to effect skills redundancy, regardless of how many enquiries you get.

Then there’s the question of location. The design purpose of service desk is to centralise call handling, but second line, principally desktop support may well need to be onsite. It may be a false economy to reduce headcount costs by choosing not to place support staff at remote sites with lesser user populations. Of course, the IT staff budget may be lower, but that may be at the cost of user productivity. Remote company employees may be idle, and thus not earning corporate revenue, because their computer problems take longer to solve in the absence of local support. Don’t simply reduce your own budget at the cost of company profitability – get the financiers to see the bigger picture and hire the number of people you really need for the service to be effective.

Equilibrium

Do you need more people to produce a faster service? Received wisdom suggests yes – I don’t think it’s as simple as that. In my experience, the thing that most influences the speed of the support service is the current size of the backlog. The bigger the backlog, often the slower the service will be. Now I know that some may think that the backlog wouldn’t be that big if we had more staff, but that’s not necessarily so. If the backlog stays roughly the same size for weeks on end, that means there is present equilibrium between the work going into the second line and the resolutions coming out. So there must be enough people to handle the current workload.

If you have that issue – big backlog, workload equilibrium – what you need to be looking at is not the number of people, but the productivity of the people already in place. I bet that more often than not, you’ll find a low FRA. If you’re not on top of the FRA and you hire more second-liners, what will usually happen is the backlog will get smaller for a while and then the FRA will fall even further. Seen it time and time again. Your problem is not a staffing one – it’s a cultural one with productivity management at its heart, and that’s something I can help with directly.

Meanwhile, please help me update those numbers by joining the IT Support Benchmark this summer of 2011.

UK Transport Secretary Philip Hammond recently called for employees in London to work from home during the Olympics next year. He said some people might consider working away from their offices, or changing travel times to avoid busy periods. If his plan is supported, these London workers will join the 3.7m UK-wide employees who ‘sometimes work from home or use home as a base’ on a daily basis (June – September 2010, ONS).

A survey of firms by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) showed that the number offering at least some teleworking (home or mobile) rose from 14 per cent in 2006 to 46 per cent in 2008. IBM currently employs 200,000 remote workers globally, BT 15,000 and HSBC 15,000. Figures later this month are expected to show the trend continuing.

If you’re running the IT for a knowledge business (HR, PR, marketing, finance, etc.) setting up employees to work from home is pretty simple. In basic terms, they just need a mobile phone, broadband and secure access to their usual PC and software applications (GoToMyPC, Logmein, Laplink Everywhere are just some of the proven remote access tools enabling home and mobile workers access to PCs and applications). In setting up a home working policy and the supporting IT infrastructure, you could argue that you have also created a green business – less employee related travel pollution would be the obvious point.

However, it is here, in IT support, that two of the most modern business policies – home working and green IT – are beginning to clash. If you’re one of the millions of IT directors or managers to have rolled out PC power management software (from any vendor) in the last couple of years, you will have learnt quickly that it becomes necessary to exclude home or mobile workers’ work based desktop PCs from PC power management policies, because those workers need access to them from home.

For example, if an employee decides to work from home on Friday using his or her laptop, the work based desktop PC will also need to remain ‘powered-on’ (and be excluded from PC power management policies) to enable the home worker, using remote access tools, to access and use it. The work based PC is also unusable by other members of staff during this process. The more encompassing the home working policy, the wider its adoption, the larger the list of excluded PCs becomes.

According to South Lanarkshire Council which recently deployed PC power management software, the energy draw of a PC is around £1 per PC per month to operate, so leaving any number of PCs powered-on during the day is not only carbon costly but financially costly.

Interestingly, according to Pike Research, over the next five years public sector and financial services will be two of the largest growth areas for PC power management (both knowledge based industries with large numbers of home workers). The PC power management vs home worker debate could be about to explode.

What’s the solution?

The largest complaint of any home worker is the isolation from colleagues and ‘the office’. Companies will undertake all manner of HR programmes to support and include home and mobile workers. PC power management must be the same. Its benefits should not stop at the office doors and it shouldn’t be a reason for home and mobile workers to not leave the office. PC power management must embrace the technology of home workers.

• Firstly, choose PC power management software which provides the ability for home workers to wake up their work based PC from home. With good systems, users can install an application onto their mobile device, which will allow them to execute Wake-on-Web functionality to wake up PCs within their work environment, which have been turned off by the Power Manager. This will allow home workers to gain remote access and use that PC productively at anytime from anywhere, whilst the company can take full advantage of power management policies. PCs no longer needed to be excluded from policies.
• Second (and it may sound obvious) but add PC power management software to notebook PCs in use by home and mobile workers. They’re all part of the same PC fleet. Don’t create a ‘them and us’ culture between office workers and home workers – they should all feel like they’re making a contribution to ‘greening the business’. Also, consider using PC power management software, which can also support Mac PCs. 5,000 of IBM’s 200,000 remote workers use Macs. It is an increasingly popular device, even outside of its traditional design and creative users.
• Third, add PC power management policies that will throttle back the power draw from applications whilst the work based desktop PC is powered on but not immediately in use. Intelligent ‘engine management’ can ‘throttle back’ to reduce power consumption when users or applications are idle, but immediately and automatically ‘throttling up’ when performance is required. This ensures that if home workers power on a work based PC in the morning, those PCs do not overly waste energy during the day.
• Finally, ensure home workers are kept informed of their personal contribution to PC energy efficiency including visibility of how they compare to their office and home based peers, to fully involve users in increasing overall efficiencies.

What’s the future?

PC power management software will continue to evolve to support home and mobile workers, to ensure they’re fully integrated into the green business.

Look out for future PC power management software versions with support for a broader range of mobile devices (to switch on work based PCs), power management software for mobile devices themselves, enhanced power saving reporting for home workers, and perhaps even policies geared to home workers returning to the office (PCs which power on as the employee passes through reception).

Almost a year ago and well before the current coalition Government was sworn in, I interviewed the chief executive of West Lancashire Borough Council, Bill Taylor MBE.  He pointed out that the emphasis was shifting from service improvement to cost cutting: “The focus for last decade has been on using technology to assist improvement in public services and that was what determined the nature of investment. It was all about customer focus and quicker access to service. … using technology to improve public service… There has been a major shift in emphasis. Public sector policy is no longer about step change improvement as it was in the past; the new game in town is all about how we get our costs down while minimising the damage done to service, or pulling off the trick of getting costs down while maintaining or improving service quality.”

Having seen Bill in action enthusiastically promoting the virtues of a customer-centric approach at a conference couple of years ago, I suspect he is one of our now much maligned public servants who really earns his salary. At the time he talked about chief executives sharing their time and skills with other councils in their regions and we have something of a focus on sharing, amongst other methods – use of open source software being a key one – to cut cost while hopefully improving service.

The use of open source software in the public sector is one of the approaches at the heart of the Government’s new ICT policy – as announced in March (see News section). On page 42 of this issue Bertrand Diard of open source integration company Talend expounds on the arguments for weaning the public sector off its reliance on large scale proprietary software projects.

I’ve long beaten the drum for IT at the heart of changes in the public sector, let us hope that these initiatives start delivering, for all our sakes.

Until next time…

Matt Bailey

Editor

Entropy is almost the only quantity in the physical sciences that requires a particular direction for time; physicists call it an ‘arrow of time’. As one goes ‘forward’ in time, the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of an isolated system will increase. Hence, from one perspective, entropy measurement is a way of distinguishing the past from the future. While the physics is interesting, practicalities are that I battle entropy at home every day – I tidy up on a given Saturday and create an environment of low entropy, but my children – my little entropy engines – go around leaving their stuff all over the house and by the following Saturday morning there is a high degree of entropy which needs to be cleared up.

Are service organisations battling (at this level of order versus chaos) entropy? A support organisation would be perfect if no-one changed the system, so if the IT support organisation requires a low degree of entropy to deliver a stable environment, then there are two different approaches they can take to risk – risk management and risk avoidance. Management indicates that risks can be taken, that there is a probability of disaster and that the event will be managed if the risk does not come off. Risk avoidance suggests that if there is a risk, that risk is managed out.

I also see that there is a much bigger development of entropy going on in the IT world. Once, there were mainframes and entropy was low, people in brown lab coats looked after the equipment and all was good.

Now there is talk of how IT Support organisations handle the ‘second screen’ in training and business, and educational establishments are contemplating a tech classroom which contains a teacher, a whiteboard and students who have personally provided themselves with a tablet or other device through which they have independent access to content which is ‘off corporate net’.

A bus is being driven through the control the IT department had on employee access to information, and there will come a time when the corporate network and the personally provided devices are in direct competition for attention. Do we ban personally provided devices with screens in the workplace or school? Do we embrace the new technology and slowly do away with centrally provided hardware, and ride the tide of personally provided devices? Will employees provide their own access devices with the IT department providing policy, applications and infrastructure only? This is entropy on a worldwide scale – the previous computing order is turning to chaos, and IT will be a totally different landscape for many companies in the next few years.

I used to think that the complexity of the IT that is being deployed would lead to a ‘Nuclear Disaster’ event, where a large company would catastrophically collapse as a direct result of over-complex IT, and that it would be of such a size that CIOs around the world would refocus their effort on stability over features. I believe that while an IT ‘Nuclear Meltdown’ is inevitable, it will not stop the tide of entropy, the arrow of time will continue on and IT will only become ever more complex, more fractured, harder to manage and harder to support.

On the face of it, the IT department is a section of the corporation serving the information and communication needs of the business. Its primary focus is technology, its people are largely engineers. This is one way of looking at IT, but it is one-sided and divisive. It is the view from outside IT. Technology? Engineers? These are simplistic terms, mere categorisations. The problem comes when the IT department comes to see itself in these terms, in other words adopting a view of itself as created by those who never really understood IT in the first place.

IT culture

This misconception is of course often assisted by IT’s internal structure and culture, an all too typical scenario.

Our technological legacy means that management attention and remuneration tend to go to those who have the most experience, and this experience tends to be technical. Too often this can cause senior technicians to get promoted in order to stop them from leaving, because the system says they can only be paid more if they are given management rank.

This is especially problematical in the public sector, where market forces usually apply with less impact than a committee-designed, union-negotiated, uniform grading structure. So we find ourselves promoting people beyond their level of competence. The risk is that these appointees continue to be technicians and make a hash of their management responsibilities.

In the middle of all this, we are under pressure to improve the service ethos in IT. But that’s immensely difficult because our departmental managers are predominantly ex-technologists. However, we find there’s a part of IT that apparently already has a service culture – namely the first line, known as the ‘helpdesk’ or ‘Service Desk’, because they talk to the users all the time – so we send that group on customer service courses to make them even better at the ‘customer service’ side of things, while the deeper technicians often get to avoid those courses because they see themselves as having been promoted beyond the need to provide a service as such.

So we have now made a faithful nod in the direction of ‘customer service’. We have all the calls go through the helpdesk, where service culture has been concentrated. We’ve also pulled off the political coup of simultaneously exonerating all other parts of IT from having a service responsibility. And meanwhile, we can now brag that we have a service culture because the helpdesk call-takers have been on a customer service course.

In other words, it is a common failure to see IT as a technocracy first, which happens to provide services to customers, with the merest, almost grudging acknowledgement of the service imperative at the heart of what we do. You can see this in the industry press. How often do you see an article about service management design, delivery and technique in the industry’s leading titles ‘Computer Weekly’ or ‘Computing’?

Another way is to see IT as a business that merely exploits the raw material of technical knowledge for its core purpose of providing services.

IT Services as a business

It starts from a reconsideration of exactly what the IT department is. We’re often accused of not being sufficiently ‘business-aware’. The business itself can claim this accolade, because it has external, paying customers or clients, whereas we, apparently, do not.

Too often, the accusation is well founded. While we continue to see ourselves as a discreet department within a business, I would argue, the foundations of that accusation will remain firm. Another way of seeing the IT group, however, is as a business in itself rather than as a functional department.

IT has everything any business would have:

• A market (the userbase);

• Untapped opportunities within that market (use of ‘vertical’ applications with imported user support, new business needs, new versions of technologies etc);

• A set of products and services;

• A production line (the various end-to-end services and processes that produce them);

• Resources (staff, skills, technology) to produce those services;

• Identifiable cost of production.

In fact, about the only factor missing from that list is an identifiable profit or margin above our production cost. Or even if the accounts system in the corporation does not allow for individual departments to profit off others, then perhaps what is missing is a range of formulas for cost-justification.

If we could complete that list and view the IT department from that standpoint, then customer service would become as much a part of our modus operandi as it is for the business proper. Instead of seeing ‘the business’ as a parent, let us see them as our marketplace.

The consequence of competition

Once we start to look at it that way, we start to see other commercial factors creeping into our philosophy. Chief among these is the concept of competition. It may appear, because our user base is effectively a captive market, that we are free from the ravages of competition, but this is not so.

Competition arises when there are several suppliers or potential suppliers of the same thing. Perhaps the users have to get their computer equipment from us, because it must be connected to the corporate network, which we own and administrate. That’s a monopoly, not competition. Perhaps the users must always call the helpdesk for user support, because we’ve stipulated for the purposes of controlling support costs that all enquiries must be formally logged. So our helpdesk too is a monopoly. But that’s not the point – this type of monopoly is a mirage.

First, they certainly may get their kit from us, but that doesn’t stop them reading the computer magazines and finding that in the real world, computers often cost a third of what we charge for twice the processing power and features. Second, the rule may state ‘log all enquiries with the helpdesk’ but that doesn’t stop the users from first asking each other.

There are two ways to deal with competition. One is to remove it from the marketplace by a takeover. I’ve seen this done, in a company that used several vertical applications in addition to its standard, horizontal office software. The specialised software and associated support were provided by external parties, often trading directly with specific groups of users. In some cases, the only thing IT Services knew about these, was that they existed and servers had to be provided to house them.

But the Service Manager had other ideas. He knew that his department was not the only group providing some form of IT support to the users, and that the standards of those alternative support offerings varied enormously. So he determined to set an overall standard for IT product and service provision to the corporation’s users, regardless of source. He then made that insistence on these external companies and took full responsibility for their performance. In effect, he acquired those external provisions because in terms of service quality they must report not to the users who engaged them, but to the IT services department.

The other way to tackle competition is to defeat it by adding value to our own provision. If the user sees his request as being satisfied solely by the provision of a hard product or solution to his enquiry, then that licenses him to seek alternative providers of that product or solution. But our response should be to take the focus away from the hard end-product – to make the user value it not for what it is, but for what it means. For example, we don’t just deliver technical answers, we do that in the context of an ownership-taking service, to guaranteed availability and response times – sure, Mr. User, you could ask the bloke next door – but does he guarantee to be available to you and to fix your problem, as we do?

IT Services delivers its offerings to a captive market. Nevertheless, competition exists in that market. I believe that the acknowledgement of this existence of competition is a crucial philosophical leap in seeing our own function as a business in its own right. With that leap having been taken, then IT Services must necessarily be as ‘business aware’ as the corporation that hosts it – simply because it too is a business. Therefore, all the functions of IT, including those placed furthest from the users, can be said to be at least as ‘business aware’ as those employees of the corporation at large who are similarly removed from the commercial front line.

The above is based on an extract from Noel’s book, ‘Managing the IT Services Process’. For more information on Noel Bruton’s work as an independent consultant and trainer in IT user support management and practice, call 01559 370270, Email noel@noelbruton.com or see his extensive Website at http://www.noelbruton.com/.

March 2011 saw the fifth anniversary of Twitter and begs the question ‘is Twitter now part of everyday life?’ The statistics would seem to indicate that yes in the answer. 140 million tweets a day and year on year increases in use since its launch. Increasingly businesses are using free online social tools, for example at Staffordshire University (http://twitter.com/StaffsUni ) we have nearly 3,000 followers and use Twitter to deliver useful short messages and advice.

Why is Twitter so popular? My view is that ease of use and synergy with mobile phones are important factors as well as the speed of twitter. Twitpic also allows the upload of photos which one can argue describe more than the 140 characters limit for a tweet.

So we are witnessing a wide, electronic grapevine in the public domain targeted to followers of individuals or organisations. Business and news use has given Twitter more authority and tweets now range from gossip/trivia to important world-wide events which unfold as they happen via a set of tweets almost like a set of jigsaw pieces.

The pros are that it is communication and what people really think in an uncensored environment and perhaps Twitter can help to differentiate an organisation and promote collaboration. Twitter can help to improve the visibility of an organisation because it’s such an open social tool and virtually all messages are searchable and indexed by Google. Whatever you talk about can be found – the dialogue can be seen and help individuals to get to know the organisation. You can see the appeal for UK Universities!

The cons of Twitter include whether anyone cares about what an individual or organisation might think or be doing at a particular time, but the usage evidence of Twitter indicates that they do! Also there is a cost to online social tools – they are not free. Your Twitter account will need staff time for the creation and maintenance of meaningful tweets to your customers. The tweets need to offer added value to generate interest in your tweet feeds.

So why not try a Twitter feed for your organisation? Get some experience and then augment with the use of hashtag registration to create a TWUBS for your organisation which is a Twitter group built around content aggregated from #hashtags, for example, http://twubs.com/nationaltrust.

References:

 http://business.twitter.com/

http://twubs.com/

With the Ryder Cup safely returned to its spiritual home just down the corridor from the IT HQ in the PGA at the Belfry and three out of the four ‘Major’ trophies being held by non Americans, hopes were high that we could see a first European winner since 1999 or a first UK winner since Sir Nick Faldo, overcame a six shot deficit going into the last round to defeat Greg Norman by five shots, in what many people consider was the worst / greatest golfing collapse by a player, leading a Major with the ‘finishing line’ in site

Westwood, McDowell, Poulter & McIlroy were all being mentioned before the event as the players to watch, with McIlroy ultimately snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and giving Greg Norman a run for his money, but it was South African Charl Schwartzel that took the title.

Lots of the talk in Augusta related to Golf looking forward to becoming an Olympic Sport at the 2016 Games in Rio, with the prospect of the greats of the game playing for their countries, expect a similar amount of interest and hype to when the greats of the NBA, put aside team differences and came together as the USA Dream Team, sweeping all before them to win gold medal after gold medal.

We in the UK are looking forward to hosting the Olympics in 2012, which look as if they will be ready on time though not on budget. It will be the first Olympics in many years where the stadium will not smell of paint and echo to the sound of last minute building as the spectators take their seats for the first events.

And speaking of ‘key dates,’ the one that I have in my diary is in summer 2014, when Microsoft finally ends support for Windows XP. Our IT hardware replacement programme here at the PGA has been adjusted so that we commence replacement of our PCs in Q1 2014, at which time we will look to move to Windows 7 or possibly Windows 8 or even Windows 9 or 10. Many remember the problems with Vista, which meant that lots of companies refreshed their equipment with XP rather than upgrading to Vista. Will IT professionals hold off from Windows 8 to ensure that it is bug free, roll over with Windows 7 and then move onto Windows 9 or 10?

With the cost of an operating system making up a significant part of the price of the computer and the rise of open source operating systems bringing new players into the market, this decision for the IT manager becomes harder and harder.