Over the last three years outsource Service Management supplier The Internet Group has been scaling up its services to add the mid-market to its existing portfolio of SME clients. In the process it has had to tackle SDI and ITIL and fundamentally shift up a gear in the way it does business. Matt Bailey spoke to the company’s managing director Adam Maurice.

It is no surprise that the outsourced IT Service Management sector is growing. In the current climate it could be argued that shifting IT services off the headcount is a sure-fire way to reduce costs – certainly in the short term. The Internet Group (TIG) is a provider of IT managed services and a 3-star SDI accredited IT Service Desk. Based in North London, it currently employs over 60 people, including more than 35 highly qualified engineers. The company was started in 1999 when managing director and founder Adam Maurice was still at school. Over the past three years it has been scaling up its business to add mid-market clients to its existing SME portfolio.

“We are seeing a number of mid-market businesses re-evaluating their IT spend,” says Adam Maurice. “The message we are getting from customers and prospects alike in the mid market is that the biggest challenge IT managers are confronted with is how to manage and keep up IT operations in a highly constrained budgetary environment. IT managers and CIOs alike are facing a tough time and they are using outsourcing as a means extending budgets and operational efficiency.”

The company came about because Maurice wanted to offer IT support to small companies that didn’t have their own internal IT department. “That was the space we were in,” he explains, “the ‘S’ of SME – companies with up to 20 users. In these types of operations you typically find that it’s the office manager or the finance person who has responsibility for the IT.”

As the financial conditions have changed over the last few years Maurice has seen demand for external IT support grow from larger businesses. “We are now offering our services to the mid-market which is a completely different prospect,” he says. “The smaller companies are after a personal relationship where the IT support staff know their business, whereas the larger clients understand that their service is more driven by process and procedure rather than the first hand knowledge.”

Process and procedure

About three years ago the company got involved with the Service Desk Institute (SDI). “In order to penetrate the middle market we needed to up our game,” says Maurice. “We needed to get all the processes and procedures in place so we went down the certification route and got a three star rating, in fact we are the smallest company in the world to achieve a three star SDI accreditation.”

 Achieving this level of accreditation meant massive investment in staff, technology, resources and training. “We now follow the complete ITIL process. The smaller companies are less interested in that sort of accreditation, they just want to know they can pick up the phone and someone will sort out their problems. At the higher end of the market it’s all about compliance and governance and whether you are recording the calls and what you are going to do about auditing, it is a completely different market.”

Three years ago when the company first ventured into the mid market it split the technical function of the business into two parts, the support services function and the project delivery function or professional services.

“We found that by implementing SDI and ITIL, the support services  became far more structured and since then we have had a kind of internal battle about who is more process-aligned. Professional Services want to be PRINCE 2 for all their projects and the support guys want to do SDI and ITIL,” says Maurice. “We felt that it was something we needed to do, but what actually happened in the business was that by becoming SDI accredited it raised the bar in the support department and all the other departments had to follow suit. By introducing SDI and ITIL to the whole business we were able to deal with the bigger companies far more easily, they expect it and many of them demand it. They need the ability track and monitor progress on calls and view statistics without asking us. All of that is given to them automatically. Smaller businesses don’t care about first contact resolution or average resolution time. All they want to ensure is that their staff are happy and their computers are working.”

One of the big challenges TIG has had as a business is in understanding what the differences are between what companies want at the SME level and the mid-market level.

“It’s requires a lot of training,” says Maurice. “The staff on the Service Desk and the escalation groups have to be able to deal with people with a wide range of IT knowledge. For example in a smaller business you may well be dealing with someone with no IT knowledge whatsoever. They don’t know what a router is and certainly don’t know how to reboot one. In a larger business there may be an IT administrator or even an IT manager on-site who has a much higher level of knowledge and we may well be dealing with their internal IT department whereas in the smaller businesses we are dealing with all their staff individually, so you have to be able to adapt your offering to deal with people in both camps. Having that spectrum of skill in the Service Desk is very important. We have had to be a lot more detailed and a lot more understanding of what those more IT-literate people want.”

Cloudy outlook?

I suggest to Maurice that when and if all applications and data are in the cloud this will level the playing field considerably. “We have yet to see much evidence of this,” he replies, “We now have clients in the very small, medium and large business groups and cloud adoption is totally varied across these groups. We have clients right now who have said they are not interested in the cloud: ‘If we can’t see it; if it’s not on our site; if we can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist’. Others say they intend to go totally cloud. Others want to go hybrid with bits of both. Although our client base is a very mixed bag, no-one yet has actually fully gone over to the cloud.”

A major TIG client that was offered a grant to completely overhaul its IT infrastructure and had the choice to move totally into the cloud instead decided to take the on-premise option. “They have replaced all their platform with VMware and still have all their servers on site. We are not seeing in our market the massive cloud adoption that people are talking about; I don’t know why. None of our clients or prospects has said they don’t like MS Exchange and have switched to Office 365, none have gone over to Google Apps. We believe the cloud is good for some things and not for others.”

Coming back to the question of where the Service Desk sits when everything is in the cloud, Maurice believes that its role becomes even more important. “If users have a problem they can’t speak directly to the cloud providers, typically because they are not offering the first and second line of support. This makes the role of the Service Desk even more important because they are the people who are going to act as a conduit between the user problem and the cloud provider. We believe that it is a growing market whether people go to the cloud or not.”

Clearly though the amount of hype and genuine provable efficiency and cold hard cash savings promised by the cloud are a big incentive to find out more.

“We sent out a mail shot to our customers about two months ago. It was about an online backup service and the subject line was ‘Online backup: What we can do for you’. We got a mixed response. Last month we sent out the same mailer, but in the subject line we put ‘Cloud backup’ and we had a massive response. This demonstrates the power of ‘cloud’ as a buzz word.”  

As we have discussed many times in these pages, the cloud in one form or another has been around for over a decade, “The recession, in my opinion is the thing that gave the cloud a massive boost. People were being told that it could save money, but there are many sectors that can’t use public cloud. I met someone from the insurance industry recently and their take on the cloud is that they can’t use it. They don’t have a cloud strategy.”

Consumerisation of IT

People are using their own devices in the workplace and this brings a whole set of challenges for IT support. “I have a friend at a large property company,” says Maurice, “They bought all their staff iPads and docking stations when they upgraded their systems. Their biggest worry was about what data was leaving the office in these devices. It is very difficult to keep control of.”

In the recent past many companies would give their staff portable devices, notable Blackberrys, but now the trend is for people to use their own iPhone, iPads and other tablet and smartphone devices. “This brings with it many data protection issues. The data on a smartphone may belong to the user’s company, but the device belongs to the user. What happens when that person leaves the company? It makes for a very complicated situation.”

Two of the major barriers to a more efficient IT world are connectivity and infrastructure. “I don’t feel I can go home and use voice over IP (VoIP) for work, the quality is not good enough. In a perfect world you could be working anywhere and nobody would know the difference. At the moment it is close, but it’s not quite there,” says Maurice. “It’s about technology enabling business. Our clients rely on us to supply solutions to allow them to grow their business and do things more effectively and efficiently. That is what technology is supposed to do. That is why the Service Desk is so important. As businesses become more reliant on technology, they need to have people on the other end of the phone who can deal with the inevitable problems in a process-driven and procedural way to allow them to get on with their business.”

Doing business in difficult times

While many are finding the going very tough as economies around the world flat-line or go into recession, Adam Maurice is optimistic about the prospects for the IT services sector. “The global recession has actually allowed us to grow very quickly because the larger companies are looking to reduce headcount and make things more efficient and streamlined,” he says. “With a lot of the bigger contracts we have been awarded over the last few years there has been an existing IT department but the directors have decided to downsize it and outsource part of the requirement.  As the world is still in the uncertain state they are trying to reduce costs and streamline the business, this makes them a lot more open to outsourcing.”

http://www.theinternetgroup.com/

A familiar name in the world of ITIL, Pink Elephant has been at the forefront of IT management best practise for over 30 years. Caroline Wyatt, Head of Corporate Development explains the company’s approach and offers an example of how its ‘classroom in the cloud’ approach to training is helping one of its clients.

Pink Elephant is an independent global professional services organisation and world leader in IT management best practices. The company exists to optimise and transform IT Services for its clients, specialising in improving the quality of IT services through the application of recognised best practice frameworks, including the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®).

The company began life in the Netherlands, over 30 years ago, and was set up by a couple of entrepreneurial Dutch graduates, one of whom is still very much at the helm of the European organisation. Supplying intelligent, motivated and service focused individuals into complex IT environments has always been a cornerstone of the company philosophy. From these origins the company now has global presence and a team of international consultants who deliver services to corporate clients around the world.

VitAL: What is the company’s specialist area or product group, if any?

Caroline Wyatt: Our approach to implementing Service Management has been honed over 20 years of supporting transformation through the implementation of IT Service Management best practices. Our approach and experience in managing people through these organisational and cultural change programmes sets us apart. We work hard to translate knowledge into results.

VitAL: Is that specialisation to make the best use of skills in the company or because it fits the company’s world view or has it simply evolved?

CW: With the first decade of the new millennium ending in a serious global financial slowdown, organisations have been forced to refocus on increasing IT value contribution while also keeping a very tight grip on costs; reducing IT risks; and increasing and sustaining the service quality provided to its customers. But at the same time, IT can no longer be seen simply as a technology supplier – it must be seen to be adding value to the business and providing corporate strategic capability.

IT business performance allows it to change the focus from technology and production to customers and services. This enables IT to become service-oriented, aligning itself with the organisation to provide innovative and customer-driven solutions to business problems.

IT Services has no other option than to transform itself from its ‘traditional’ support function to that of strategic contributor to business success now and in the future.

VitAL: How has any specialisation influenced the company’s general stance?

CW: This is Pink Elephant’s business. The basis of our success is our unique understanding of how service organisations develop, what underlying processes are needed to make technology consistently valuable, and how people feel and behave. This understanding and knowledge is the basis for our success.

Pink Elephant does not sell any hardware or software. We don’t design or develop technical systems. We are an Independent ITSM professional services company and think that understanding what our clients need comes from a broad view of what goes on in our industry and society in general.

We recognise how important people are to our success, so we have developed selection criteria that ensure we provide the right people who will bring expertise and enthusiasm to any project. They are passionate about what they do. They are also chosen because they have the practical knowledge which they can translate into results. They have the ability transfer that knowledge to your people, so that they can translate it into results.

We attract the best people in the industry. That is why our clients entrust us with accountability in their most critical projects.

Our people are not simply IT professionals. Whether they are consultants, trainers, analysts or support staff, they are capable, and trained ITSM thought leaders. They create and develop ITSM products and services, many being accepted as the, ‘industry standard’. We have always been at the forefront of ITIL, from its inception through to the latest version, and our people are still actively participating in its future development.

VitAL: who are the company’s main customers today and in the future?

CW: Our customers are pre-dominantly market-leading blue chips with large, complex IT infrastructures, although increasingly we service clients from both private and the public sector as control, governance and the need to improve services becomes all pervasive.

We strive to be agile, flexible and responsive to devise solutions that fit our clients’ unique situations. And in the drive to be thought leaders in our field we are always looking to the future, for a better way of working, on how to improve services, delivery and value to our clients.

To support this assertion and to demonstrate how we operate, we felt it would be useful to include a case study written with one of our key Education clients rather than keep talking about how great we are!

A virtual world of ITIL learning goes live at CSC

Background: CSC is one of the world’s largest and most respected providers of information technology services. For more than 50 years, CSC has provided technology-enabled solutions and services to solve their clients’ toughest challenges. CSC has approximately 93,000 professionals serving clients in more than 90 countries. In EMEA there are approximately 21,400 professionals with around 7,500 of those based in the UK.

The delivery of managed IT services is a vital part of CSC’s business. And as a leading provider of consulting and outsourcing solutions to blue chip clients in every major industry sector, CSC is committed to driving business effectiveness for customers through the delivery of IT services founded in ITIL-aligned processes and workflows.

Maintaining a highly qualified ITIL workforce is therefore critical to the day-to-day service management and service operations businesses of CSC, and training staff to achieve ITIL Foundation, Intermediate and Expert Level certification is a strategic priority for the company.

The challenge: In the UK, CSC has a widely distributed workforce. This makes classroom-based training events a logistical and financial challenge. And when it comes to removing key personnel from client services to undertake a five-day ITIL Intermediate level certification course, the scheduling issues for staff can be immense.

With burgeoning travel and accommodation costs eating into valuable training budgets, it was time for a new approach as Robert Humphrey, EMEA Learning and Development Manager at CSC, explains.

“We wanted to take the ITIL classroom to our people – giving them access to high quality interactive training that’s easy to schedule into a working day,” he says. “Alongside minimising disruption to our personnel, delivering ITIL in a virtual learning environment would allow us to reinvest savings on travel and accommodation costs into what counts most – more training for more people.”

When considering this new approach CSC contacted its ITIL Education Partner, Pink Elephant. Having already used it for traditional classroom courses and worked with it to successfully develop an innovative blended learning ITIL Foundation programme for its staff they were the first choice to help enable its ‘classroom in the cloud’ vision for ITIL practitioners.

The solution: In close collaboration with the Learning and Development and Service Management resourcing teams at CSC, Pink Elephant evolved a format that would ensure delegates would benefit from an engaging and fully interactive online learning environment that provided ample opportunities for collaboration and debate – a key aspect of Pink Elephant’s approach to ITIL advanced learning programmes.

Using REDTRAY’s e-learning delivery platform – an on-demand online meeting, web conferencing and videoconferencing application – Pink Elephant evolved an instructor-led online classroom training programme.

As Robert Humphrey highlights, getting the initial induction session right was key. It was important to establish delegates were confident using the technology, were clear on the training objectives, and were fully engaged with the virtual classroom programme format.

“We wanted to demonstrate that this approach would give them everything they’d experience in a real-world classroom – and more,” he says. “We worked hard to ensure the induction set the scene for positive and productive delegate participation.”

During each five week ITIL Intermediate course delegates attend twice-weekly three-hour instructor-led online sessions from the comfort of their desk. Alongside being able to hear a Pink Elephant lecturer, delegates can view and participate in interactive whiteboard presentations in real time, respond to questions, engage in group discussions, and write and share e-notes.

What’s more, each ‘bite-sized ITIL’ session is recorded so delegates can revisit and review sessions as often as they need. During each live session the Pink Elephant lecturer monitors individual delegate presence, providing ongoing mentoring and support. Management reports on attendance and scoring from course exercises enable the lecturer to identify who is doing well and who needs extra support. This reporting also supports discussion with the training function and the delegate’s manager if there are any issues. Having a course that runs over five weeks means that issues can be picked up and resolved effectively.

But that’s not all. Between sessions delegates have access to a closed portal where they can ask the trainer questions, share and review responses, tap into a Trainer Blog, access additional mentoring, and communicate with other course participants.

At the close of the programme, delegates come together in the ‘real world’ for an intensive morning review session before sitting the ITIL certification examination in the afternoon.

The outcomes: “Delegate feedback on the programme has been excellent,” confirms Robert Humphrey, “but the results speak for themselves.”

Following the initial pilot programme, delegate pass rates were on par with the traditional classroom-based course pass rate of 90 percent. But today CSC is achieving a 100 percent pass rate, with some delegates achieving the maximum score possible in the final ITIL certification exam.

“Pink Elephant worked with us to adapt the format exactly to our needs,” explains Humphrey. “They have an excellent track record in ITIL education and collaborated closely with us to ensure the virtual learning programme for ITIL practitioners was refined to our specific needs – evolving, for example, the online learning community to supplement virtual classroom sessions.”

Delegates confirm the bite-sized online sessions are much easier to schedule alongside daily work responsibilities, with the added benefit of giving them time to think about and absorb information between sessions. What’s more, the new trail blazing approach has enabled CSC to release around 40 percent of its ITIL Practitioner training budget – previously allocated for travel and accommodation – to deliver additional training.

“We’ve shown the virtual world of advanced ITIL learning can be just as effective and fulfilling for delegates – and that our trail blazing approach has paid off in more ways than one,” concludes Humphrey. Following the successful launch of the programme in the UK, CSC is now looking to roll out the ITIL Practitioner ‘classroom in the cloud’ initiative across Europe.

www.pinkelephant.com

Delegate perspectives:

Ben Thompson – Service Level Manager, Manufacturing, CSC UK

Ben confirms his biggest worry before attending the pilot online ITIL v3 Intermediate Operational Support & Analysis course was that he’d miss out on valuable interaction with other delegates. “As it turned out, my concerns were completely unjustified” he says. “The virtual classroom approach was just as effective and enjoyable and it was easy to build rapport with the others. What’s more, the Pink Elephant lecturer created a community of trust in which open discussion and debate was actively encouraged.”

Cath Gardiner – ESM New Business Manager, CSC UK

Cath Gardiner admits she had no trepidations about the ‘classroom in the cloud’ aspect of her course. For her, tackling the advanced ITIL v3 Intermediate Operational Support & Analysis topic matter was the big challenge. “I knew this would be a big step up from ITIL Foundation level, but the twice weekly sessions made it easy to get on board with the material – and were painless to schedule into my working week,” she says. But it was the final review and examination day that proved a real highlight. “You finally get to meet everyone and put a face to a name – it really helps to cement relationships,” she confirms. “And it was great to get that vital last input from a Pink Elephant lecturer before taking the exam.”

At a recent seminar, the delegates chose the Service Catalogue as their focus. With this in mind, Cherwell Software’s Tony Probert, sets out to explore the business benefits for an organisation of developing and implementing a Service Catalogue.

Having attended a recent seminar hosted by the Service Desk Institute (SDI), it reminded me that people directly involved in the Service Desk industry can often take things for granted and assume that the rest of the world should also understand things that we might take as a given. In this particular instance the topic was Service Catalogues, something that is now accepted as commonplace by vendors, industry analysts, ITIL gurus, etc. However, this occasion was a sharp reminder to me that those people on the day-to-day front line of service delivery do not necessarily have the time or luxury of keeping themselves up to date with evolving trends and initiatives, albeit that they may hold significant business benefits. In one of the sessions during the SDI seminar delegates suggested and chose a key topic for a roundtable work group, and the largest group by far was for those who wanted to know more about Service Catalogues.

Working on the premise that this group were representative of those people that worked in the UK Service Desk industry, it seemed timely and appropriate to write this article to explain and explore the business benefits of developing and implementing a Service Catalogue for an organisation. Although the concept of a Service Catalogue has principally been a product of the ITIL initiative, you do not need to necessarily adopt the ITIL framework or become practitioners. Ultimately, good business practice is good business practice and if it offers significantly business value, then it behoves any organisation to review and consider the implications and benefits that implementing a Service Catalogue could potentially offer.  

Even if you are familiar with the Service Catalogue concept from a business or technical perspective, I encourage you to read on as you may find the definitions and guidelines useful to deploy in your own organisation.  So let’s start with getting back to basics.

What is a Service Catalogue?

A Service Catalogue is a list of services that an organisation provides, often to its employees or customers. Each service within the catalogue typically includes:

•              A description of the service;

•              Timeframes or service level agreement for fulfilling the service;

•              Who is entitled to request/view the service;

•              Costs (if any);

•              How to fulfil the service.

The user perspective: A user goes to a website to search for a specific service, such as requesting a new laptop, requesting a change in benefits, or adding a new employee to a department. The Service Catalogue site groups services by category and allows for searching (especially when hundreds or thousands of services are available). The user selects a desired service and sees the description and details. The user enters any pertinent information (contact information, service-specific questions) and submits the request for service. The request requires approval, and goes through routing, service-level management, and other processes necessary to fulfil the request. The user may return to the site later to check on the status of a request, or to view overall metrics on how well the organisation is performing the services it provides.

The business perspective: Business unit managers determine what services should be ‘published’ to end-users via the Service Catalogue. Business unit managers and analysts define what questions are to be asked of the user, any approvals necessary for a request, and what other systems or processes are needed to fulfil the request. Once the service is defined and the fulfilment process organised, these people or a more technical employee would build the requisite functionality into the service definition and then publish this to the Service Catalogue, which is typically an integrated component of an ITSM software solution.

From the two perspectives outlined above you can now begin to understand how the introduction of a Service Catalogue achieves two key objectives:
1. Providing a structured self-service approach to end users, thereby reducing the amount of calls and requests that need to be manually handled by the service desk;
2. The business is able to build a well defined list of services, ensuring a consistent approach to the delivery of required business services.

Benefits of a Service Catalogue

There are a variety of benefits a Service Catalogue can provide. Just the creation of an initial version of a Service Catalogue, essentially listing the services IT offers to its customers already has a benefit by framing the conversation between an IT department and the customer. Offerings will be more standardised, as now there is a basis for discussion and changes should follow a standard change process.

A Service Catalogue can also be used to manage consumption and provide visibility for customers into their usage of corporate IT services. In order to achieve that, it would have to be connected to (or be the system of record) for IT usage and consumption data.

Finally, by interfacing a Service Catalogue with the Request Fulfilment process, thereby creating a Service Request, the Service Catalogue can also help in the management of the Request Fulfilment process, essentially automating that process. For example, a user who needs a laptop replacement could simply ‘order’ that laptop via a Service Request. The Service Catalogue will ensure that all necessary approvers will be notified, the approvals will be recorded, and the delivery process for the new laptop started. The user can be kept up-to-date along the way by automated notifications as the request progresses, until the laptop is eventually delivered to the user’s desk.

Start small and evolve

Many Service Catalogue software applications have common characteristics and can be often heavy on definitions, but lacking in service delivery workflow management for IT, as well as falling short on providing a simple way for internal or external users to order services and tracking the progress of delivery tasks.

The IT groups for many organisations are already performing back office fulfilment tasks, albeit often manually and inefficiently. Therefore, in order to implement an effective Service Catalogue, they need to develop efficient and repeatable processes for service request fulfilment, publish available services online, and tie online user Service Catalogue interactions into back office service delivery processes. This obviously requires a degree of effort, but if IT organisations start with a focus on their four or five most heavily requested IT services (and add more at a later stage), a simple Service Catalogue implementation can be accomplished fairly quickly, without a huge software investment and implementation project. Business service delivery improvements, such as reduced service desk workload, can be realised quickly. The IT team can then re-deploy existing resources into expanding the Service Catalogue. In fact, Service Catalogue initiatives that start modestly and grow over time produce measurable cost savings within just a few months. These savings can be reinvested in the Service Catalogue, making it essentially self-funding very quickly.

Planning to design and implement a Service Catalogue

The key to success in any project is to ensure appropriate design and definition of the required services to be built and delivered. The following section provides some general direction and advice regarding the initial design and definition of a Service Catalogue.

Be clear as to the purpose of a Service Catalogue:

• Provide a clear picture of all the business services for which you are responsible for;

• Foster a clear understanding of what your customers can expect from using those services;

• Provide a basis for managing and monitoring the infrastructure that is aligned to business requirements.

Identify and define required service types: A Service Catalogue has two components and it is important to understand what you need to design and implement for your organisation.

1. The Business Service Catalogue – This contains details of all IT Services delivered to the Business (in Business speak and available to the Business if required). The Business Service Catalogue should contain the relationships with business units and business processes that are supported by each IT Service. Typically these are in the forms of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Example: Project Management, Procurement, Application Development and enhancement, IT Support

2. The Technical Service Catalogue – This expands the on the Business Service Catalogue with relationships to supporting services, shared services, components and Configuration Items necessary to support the provision of services to the Business (typically this is an internal IT information source, so is not usually available to the Business). The Technical Service Catalogue focuses internally on defining and documenting support agreements and contracts (Operational Level Agreements and contracts with external providers or third parties). Example: Email Management, Network Management;

Service Classification: Next there are three classes of services. These become particularly important when, if you extend this model to cost out the services you provide:

1. Core IT Services: These include services that are required by all stakeholders (irrespective of the line of business) to be up and running. Every business function would need these services to exist in the working environment. In terms of extending this model to chargeback, every business function would have to pay an appropriate share; there is no option to opt out of this service. Example: telephony, Email, IT infrastructure support.

2. Subscription Based Services: Based on their line of business, a client could subscribe to these services. In terms of extending this model to chargeback, these services will only apply to a client if the client subscribes to the service. Example: Research for the Customer, Non Standard Technology Evaluation, Application Support

3. On Demand Services: These are discretionary services that IT provides on a pay-per-use basis. In terms of extending this model to chargeback, these services can be charged back to the client whenever the client requests special activities outside the standard service package. Example: IT consulting, project management etc.

Some simple guidelines

Adopt the KISS principle to avoid over complication: Your primary objective for creating an actionable Service Catalogue is to clearly differentiate service requests into finite tasks that can be completed in short time frames. Creating Service Catalogue complexity will only frustrate users, who will then attempt to find ways around the new processes by submitting requests through back door channels, making service measurement and improvement all but impossible moving forward.

Avoid pre-built service content: Although this notion may run counter to industry trends—as many software vendors offer prebuilt service definitions and SLAs—every organisation is different and has unique communication and service delivery needs. A one size fits all approach to content often does not fit any organisation very well. Increasingly more organisations recognise the need to define their own services and SLAs. These organisations realise that pre-built content, which forces arbitrary process changes, has little real value and may even be counterproductive. The term ‘round peg in a square hole’ comes to mind. So, those solutions that offer customisable templates could be better options to consider. By starting small with discrete, easily definable services and using a flexible software solution that makes it simple to add services over time, it is significantly easier to avoid the problems associated with fixed, pre-built content.

Focus on delivering clean, simple and quick wins: Avoid being drawn into the creation of over elaborate service definitions. What can be defined as ‘standard’ definitions end up being too generic to be meaningful to business users who have specific job-related or business needs. Therefore, a good Service Catalogue will focus on making it easy for users to request services and track delivery status, while standardising and automating back office fulfilment activities.

Many ITSM products now provide the majority, if not all of the functionality (but some products are definitely better than others) that once had to be custom developed. With that in mind, more organisations are starting small on Service Catalogue projects to avoid the “Big Bang” approach. As previously mentioned some start with as few as five commonly requested service items, enabling them to quickly provide real value to the business. The buy-in generated by getting a Service Catalogue implemented and quickly providing value is a solid start toward maintaining the momentum. Start small, think big. That’s the way most successful businesses get going and that is the best advice IT groups can follow when it comes to Service Catalogues.

Can Service Catalogues change the face of IT?

Service Catalogues provide numerous benefits to IT departments, including; reduced costs, improved delivery times and enhanced service quality. From a broader perspective, a well implemented Service Catalogue can radically alter the role and perception of IT within an organisation. As IT is seen to streamline service request and delivery processes through the use of Service Catalogues, it will actually start to welcome additional projects and encourage the use of its services by marketing projects to targeted internal groups and departments. This is a major shift. Users will see IT as less of an unresponsive service provider and more of a business partner/enabler.

Impatience with the delivery of IT projects has led many larger organisations to hire outside consultancy groups and contractors. As a result, IT can lose control over technology services and infrastructure. Business and IT infrastructure projects can become ends in and of themselves, sidetracked from achieving critical business objectives. Service Catalogues can put IT back in control. Enabling them to identify key services and standardising their delivery processes will allow IT to improve response times, assume more responsibilities, develop new and more business-focused skill sets, and reduce reliance on outsourcing for strategic projects.

IT roles in the past have been highly technical and often specialised. Service Catalogues will result in more business-focused service ownership. Since Service Catalogues enable IT to be run more as a business, those designated as services owners will need increased business skills, as opposed to traditional technical skills alone.

Although improved ITSM solution Service Catalogue offerings are becoming increasingly main stream, there are still large numbers of organisations where this function is provided as a discrete, rather than integrated service. Even though these discrete systems can provide useful Service Catalogues, users still have to stop what they are doing and access a separate application to request services. An integrated technology solution will provide relevant Service Catalogue pages directly via corporate web portals, so users can request a service without unduly interrupting their own workflow and so offering a distinct business benefit.

Service Catalogues – a panacea for service improvement?

Will the introduction of Service Catalogues cure many of the service delivery headaches experienced by our IT professionals? Not necessarily, but the business benefits of Service Catalogues should be obvious to both the IT and end user communities. Most organisations provide their end users and customers with a list of the services and products they provide, a convenient way to order them, and terms of their delivery. So why not integrate these with service management delivery and automate the processes?

For the more sophisticated business, these processes are often automatically tied into fulfilment and financial systems that automate the order fulfilment and accounting processes. These systems routinely collect a variety of data, which is used to identify service-fulfilment bottlenecks, improve delivery processes, reduce costs and personalise customer experiences. To run as a business, IT needs to adopt the same processes as the business it serves. Therefore, the adoption of a Service Catalogue culture for an organisation will undoubtedly improve service delivery and service quality for the benefit of all.

http://www.cherwell.com/

Christine Headford, product director at RMS Services explains why continual service improvement (CSI) must evolve to include business intelligence (BI) and how HEROes – highly empowered and resourceful operatives can help.

ITIL has been around a long time; it is 20 years since the first ITIL manuals started appearing on desks and IT professionals started collecting their ITIL badges. The industry saw a pronounced surge in take up at the start of the 21st century and most IT departments now operate along common lines even if not overtly purporting to be ‘doing’ ITIL, due to a common understanding of the key processes involved.

The jargon of ITIL, of Incidents, Problems and Changes, has been adopted as the lexicon of ITSM almost without thought to its origin. However, organisations who implement ITIL as a deliberate methodology fully realise that it is not a one-off task to set up their ITSM processes, but an ongoing mission to continually improve. This is described within ITIL as Continual Service Improvement, where, having set up a service, your process includes mechanisms to continually identify areas for improvement. But how long before you run out of opportunities?

Opportunities for improvement

At the outset of an ITIL project the opportunities for improvement are obvious and we have seen ITSM product fashions supporting the next quick win. We’ve seen online knowledge bases to improve first time fix rates, and automated monitoring tools to automatically detect failures, report them and even fix them without user intervention. More recently the fashion has been for self service, with end user portals, and online service catalogues.

There will be further opportunities for significant improvements, as new technologies become available. For example, technologies now exist which read a person’s micro expressions and tell you how they are really feeling. How useful would it be for helpdesk staff to be able to understand the level of frustration being experienced by the user they are currently helping? There are also badges your staff can wear which monitor how people are interacting and can help promote cooperative team work. But to get results now, rather than look for technology to provide the improvement, where do you direct your efforts?

The concern is that ITSM and ITIL are proving the 80/20 rule in as much that for 20 percent of the effort you can achieve 80 percent of the required result. We assert that the 80 percent has now been realised and IT now has to work much harder to get a significant return. So organisations will need to be able to judge just how much effort is needed and just what the return will be, otherwise the initiative may well be uneconomic.  The low hanging fruit have already been picked and now it’s time to reach a little higher.

The answer to this is Business Intelligence (BI). The world of BI has been focused on the enterprise and running the business, but successful organisations treat IT as a business within the business, and it should turn the BI focus on itself. The problem in the past has been the cost and effort of implementing BI, with large ramp up times and expensive tools. But with the advent of Agile BI tools and Self Service BI, this is now changing and the opportunity is there for IT to turn the spotlight on its own performance. Now is the time that ITIL and BI can, and should, converge.

Looking for the detail

“The days of a ‘universal panacea’ that will give improvement to all are over. Organisations now have to look at the detail of what they want to do to drive improvement, and this can only be done with a suitable Business Intelligence tool – so the two are becoming intrinsically linked,” said David Williams, MD of RMS Services. But what can BI show you? Hidden in your ITSM system are copious data, that if revealed would provide very interesting information.

The first place to start is a high level view across different aspects of the services provided. This might be looking at trends in volumes, response metrics, and costing information, where anomalies may show. Is a particular application taking significantly more time and effort to implement/support/upgrade than others? Are there spikes in the number of incidents – what could be causing these?

An important point to note is that the information needed to give these insights is often spread across many databases and spreadsheets. But luckily, the new range of Agile BI tools can pull this information together easily and allow information from one area to be combined with information from another.

Having spotted an interesting anomaly, the BI tool should then allow a deep dive into the data, dicing and slicing by different criteria and displaying the raw data as necessary.

The spikes in incidents may be associated with particular types of changes, which can be seen by overlaying the trends in incidents, with the change schedule, isolating particular types. Understanding what has happened may allow you to address the issue and stop those incidents in the first place. However, finding this level of detail with traditional BI tools has placed a considerable strain on already stretched IT resources.

Holding out for a HERO

The market-leading independent research company, Forrester, has recognised this phenomenon christening the champions within a company as ‘HEROes’ – it is important to enable these heroes with self service tools that can be provided by the company’s IT Department enabling the individual, whilst retaining control.

“Groundswell technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud — put tremendous power in the hands of customers. Only empowered employees can respond at the speed of empowered customers — and they’re often information workers outside of IT. We call these innovative information workers HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. The HERO Index is a new tool we have developed to measure just how empowered and resourceful your own employees are. Our data reveals that some industries (like technology products and services) and job descriptions (like marketing and nonretail sales) harbour more HEROes than others. Your new job is to find the HEROes in your organisation and to encourage and support their innovative applications.”

Forrester Research, Inc., The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees, June 2010.

“In Forrester’s recently published book, Empowered, Forrester Research analysts describe ways that new technologies can empower business people and make them true HEROes through individual contributions to their respective company’s top and bottom lines. The book also points out how business intelligence (BI) is a key technology for HEROes, not only helping them to make sense of the mountains of data that they have to deal with, but actually allowing them to make better and faster decisions. But BI applications tend to exhibit an interesting paradoxical pattern: The more you use them, the more new and different requirements keep pouring in. This never-ending snowball effect of new BI requests from business users puts a significant strain on IT resources. Even with the most noble IT efforts, the ‘build it and they will come’ BI paradox will take its toll. In the end, BI business users have no choice but to start fulfilling a significant portion of their own BI requirements using BI technologies that can enable BI self-service and empower BI.”

Forrester Research, Inc. Report ‘Empower BI HEROES With Self-Service’ (October 2010)

The impact of improvement

The other area of interest is in really understanding the impact of improvements you make. You may suppose that adding additional staff to a particular process will increase the performance of that area, but what actually happens? You’re more likely to see an initial dip as existing staff help train the new people, but how long does this last and when do you start to see the improvement? By mapping the changes in resourcing to the performance metrics you will be able to understand the necessary bedding-in period for particular types of improvements and set expectations accordingly.

Initiatives, which were made on an economic case for a specific return on investment, will now be able to prove, or disprove themselves, by turning the spotlight on the data, through BI. Management will demand this level of planning and control and IT will need to implement BI to support it.

People are asking, has ITIL has its day? But with CSI it will go on forever – when supported by agile BI.

http://www.rms.co.uk/

East Coast Main Line forms one of the UK’s main transport arteries, linking London, the East Midlands, Yorkshire, North-East England and Scotland; it carried more than 18 million passengers in 2010. Founded in 1996, the number of services the company operates has almost doubled since then, and was set to increase by a further 15 percent during 2011. It has 3,100 employees at 15 stations, depots and offices located along its routes. It has also pioneered the use of technology on railways by being the first UK train route to offer wireless internet access.

To add to this complexity, East Coast is currently moving from ownership by National Express, which it transferred from in 2010, to being re-franchised in 2013. As its existing Service Desk was delivered from a basic, centralised National Express call logging system, East Coast needed to implement an entirely new system for its analysts who handle requests from its staff across the UK. This support was also extended to the 3,500 customers who use its onboard Wi-Fi every day. The rail company therefore engaged in an evaluation process to identify a Service Desk solution that would not only effectively meet these requirements but could be implemented within a tight, three-month independence timetable from National Express. In the end it plumped for Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM solution.

IT support on the move

“East Coast Main Line was franchised to National Express,” explains Service Desk manager David Wilson. “But last year we reverted but to public ownership and we are looking to go back out to tender in 2013. When National Express originally took us over we had a very small, five-man Service Desk team which was taken in to National Express. When we left we had to quickly put together a new Service Desk team and that’s when we decided to go with Supportworks . From ordering, we had it in and running in eight weeks including importing the existing call data from National Express.

“About a year ago we launched our own Service Desk which covers our internal IT as well as our Wi-Fi customers – about 3,500 users a day,” adds Wilson. “The transition went very smoothly and after a year up and running it’s operating very well.”

Day to day, the Service Desk supports a varied range of customers. “We cover all the railway systems support, our control centre systems which operate 24/7 365 days a year, in addition we cover the sort of finance and administration systems that any large organisation has,” says Wilson. “On top of that we also provide support for EPOS (electronic point of sale) retailing systems, up and down the route and on board trains as well as the on-board Wi-Fi service.”

Unique challenge

With so much of the IT estate constantly on the move, the Service Desk is presented with a unique challenge. “All our kit and configuration is recorded in the support tool,” explains Wilson, “so we can keep track of everything that way. There is a server and a Wi-Fi system on every train which is associated with an asset number and we track it that way. The fact that it is part of a few hundred tonnes of equipment shuttling around at 120mph is really by the by as far as configuration tracking is concerned. What we have is a wide area network (WAN) with parts of it that are mobile. Each train has its own local area network (LAN) on-board which goes out to the internet via an on-board communications solution. It facilitates the customer Wi-Fi but also allows our VPN (virtual private network) to cover our rolling stock.” 

Under National Express, East Coast had two years running with a system that did not offer asset tracking, customer management or reporting at all. “We were a bit blinded to the volume of calls coming in, how they were breaking down and which areas of the business were affected,” says Wilson. “Supportworks pulls in all our customer information straight away; it ties in to our operations systems and all our assets are automatically updated every evening. Basically it gives us full control and visibility of all the assets and customers we are supporting. Once you have all that in place you can start trending against it. This allows us to see which systems are experiencing problems and undertake effective problem management and start addressing the underlying issues rather than just fire-fighting which is where we were for two years with National Express.”

East Coast now has full visibility across support requests. This has enabled the Service Desk team to offer stronger SLAs and improve asset management processes. For example since all requests for user account creation, new hardware and software and other benefits pass through Supportworks, East Coast can monitor user accounts, hardware purchasing, software licensing and other factors to ensure that such items are being allocated correctly. In total, SLA resolution has improved by eight percent.

The IT Support team has seen the time spent on support calls fall by 10 percent, with customer Wi-Fi calls able to be resolved within five minutes. As a result, it can spend less time dealing with regular IT support calls and more time on the unique support issues that have arisen as East Coast moves towards independent ownership of all of its IT resources. For example, East Coast has been able to pinpoint and repair recurring areas of failure in its onboard EPOS system.

Support expansion

East Coast is now looking to expand its configuration management database (CMDB) which currently only covers hardware items. “We are looking to put all our mobile telecommunications into the CMDB as well,” says Wilson. “We are introducing automated reporting for various system owners and department heads, They like to see what their teams are doing and how their systems are performing so we’re getting all that automated and set up so it moves the administration overhead from those teams, freeing up their staff for more valuable work. We are also developing web-based self-service which will be specifically branded for East Coast, with our specific processes in place.”

When this is completed in Q4 2011, users will be able to fix certain issues themselves. This will in turn reduce time spent on calls, free the support department for more proactive action and help establish the new, public-sector East Coast Mainline as an organisation with first-class IT support.

“We wanted the move to being a public sector organisation to mean more than just a change of ownership. We wanted to take the opportunity to transform the services we could offer both to our customers and our own internal users,” concludes Wilson.

Which facet of cloud computer services do you currently use or need? The options seem to be endless, but include Platform as a Service (or good old Server virtualisation), Software as a Service (or application virtualisation) and Desktop as a Service (or desktop virtualisation) to name but a few. There is a cloud computing option for nearly all aspects of IT and I am sure others will follow in the future. If the selection possibilities of cloud computing services aren’t bad enough, the complexity increases further by the increasing number of deployment methods; such as, private, public, community, and hybrid clouds.

Public cloud

The market place is full of Public cloud service providers who will sell a variety of services but can these really be relied on? These public services do come with distinct benefits to businesses, like easy setup, minimal capital investment, and scalability, but these services have not been without well reported incidents, which have even affected the whole service at some providers, raising questions on the reliability. Of course, the good old Service Level Agreement (SLA) will be mentioned, but what protection does this really give you should all your business systems be affected – very little in most cases. The fact that this is an agreement means the provider will always want exemptions covering most the larger incidents as they are classed as “out of their control” and the businesses will always be convinced that these are so unlikely to occur that it is isn’t an issue. Of course, the impact can be devastating especially to small businesses.

The use of public cloud services puts a high reliance on connectivity to the Internet – lose your internet link or have service provider issues then and you can’t access your systems. Thus to take full advantage of public cloud services you need to have a suitable and reliable internet connectivity but can small businesses really afford this? This is likely to be tested even further now that cloud computing devices are coming to market which have all applications and data held within the cloud.

Private cloud

Most large organisations have implemented Private clouds via IT infrastructures installed and managed locally within their own network. In many infrastructures this started out as a simple way of providing virtual servers to reduce the quantity of physical equipment being installed in data centres but these internal services are growing to cover all aspects of cloud computing from application services to virtual desktop environments. To ensure performance and reliability of the infrastructure used to support these new private cloud services businesses are finding that the physical equipment within the data centre is starting to grow again (like Jevons Paradox ), thus impacting on the power and environmental provision.

This growing provision of private cloud services can mean a large capital investment in infrastructure equipment but despite this, many of the benefits of public clouds can be found. Perhaps the major obstacle to many businesses for implementing Private clouds is the technical resources needed to manage the environment – can current staff be trained? Or do they have time to take over these roles? Or are new staff needed? Either way private cloud services can bring cloud computing to an organisation while solving some of the issues of public clouds and removing the reliance on internet connections.

Is hybrid the best option?

So which is best? The obvious, well heralded, answer is a hybrid cloud, ie, a mixture of the two. This allows local cloud services to support business critical applications and storage of important data, while allowing with public cloud services to be used to provide additional capacity and resilience.

Many of the major software companies are now starting to provide applications which can take benefit of this hybrid cloud infrastructure and this trend seems to be continuing. At present the main approach seems to be via ‘federated’ management which allows both private and public cloud provided services to be managed from a single point and in most cases will also provide mechanisms to migrate data between them.

The cloud in the public sector

While the business community starts to make good use of cloud computing, is this true within the public sector? The public sector has started to use cloud services, such as universities using cloud-based services for the provision of email to their students (and in some cases staff) but the level of take up on other cloud services seems to be slow.

A fundamental part of cloud services is that the system can be anywhere on the internet but this ambiguous location of the service and hence the data it holds has been a major obstacle for public sector organisations although the Government has now released guidelines covering this. A few providers (such as the email services mentioned above) have mitigated this by installing large data centres within the European Union and have contracts confirming that all data will be retained within the EU.

To drive the move towards cloud computing further, the UK Government launched Phase 2 of its Data Centre Strategy in March 2011, a project labelled the G-Cloud, for which the Cabinet Office report stated the following:

“Public sector organisations will benefit from ready access to a wide range of pre-accredited ICT services. These will include both ‘public cloud’ services and common and custom ‘private cloud’ services procured by other public sector organisations. Services will offer usage-based pricing, elastic scalability (up or down), and there will be in built flexibility to switch to alternate services or providers.”

The level to which this strategy is adopted is still to be seen but some of the first implementation plans are due to be released in next few months – it is clear there are potential savings and other benefits to be made.

Even within the education sector cloud computing strategies are being created. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced a programme, as part of a suite of activities under the University Modernisation Fund (UMF), which will see a £12.5 million investment to “deliver efficiencies through shared services in cloud computing infrastructure and applications”. This funding includes £10 million for shared IT infrastructure, to support the delivery of virtual servers, storage and data management applications. There is also funding of £2.5 million to establish cloud computing and shared services in central administration functions to support learning, teaching, and research.             

While this shows all sectors are moving towards a cloud computing model, there is definitely a difference in pace with the public sector clearly wanting some assurances or guarantees of service which seems to mean a private or hybrid cloud computing environment.

Cloud – What next?

It is difficult to be certain of what lies ahead, especially without a crystal ball that could tell you the future of IT, but cloud computing seems to be with us for a while. The benefits of cloud computing services are not limited to small areas of business but are capable of supporting everything from large corporate, to small businesses and even public sector organisations.

Obviously the requirements of each business area changes and hence the type of cloud computing service is different. Small businesses are likely to have fewer internal resources and thus put more emphasis on public cloud services whereas corporate organisations will have greater flexibility and resources so are more likely to go for private or hybrid cloud environments. Even with these differences in approach, there are some common areas of improvement needed:

Service Level Agreements: The service level agreements provided for services needs to be more robust and cover all aspects of the service so that businesses can be sure they can function or be covered for any loss. An interesting element is how SLAs will be developed to cover hybrid environments in future.

Internet connectivity: To take full advantage of internet-based cloud computing services the performance and reliability of Internet services needs to be high. The SLA for these Internet services also needs to be improved in line with those mentioned above.

Data location: Service providers are going to have to provide some guarantees on location of data and the controls applied.

Integration: To enable greater use of the different deployment models the virtualisation infrastructure used by service providers and businesses will need to compatible so that services can be transferred seamlessly between them.

So there are some aspects of cloud computing which need to be addressed and improved but the whole industry seems to be behind this approach – we just need to hope that everyone follows the same path and puts the user of cloud services first.

Cloud computing’s adoption rate is quickly accelerating and, spurred by organisations’ need to enable growth and reduce costs, it’s now transitioning from the very early adopters, to an early majority phase in the technology adoption lifecycle. It’s seen by many CIOs as the next logical solution, as capital expenditure is replaced with operational expenditure and users benefit from the economies of scale that cloud computing brings.

In fact, according to a report published in May 2011 by Ovum, nearly 50 percent of multinational corporations are using cloud computing services of some kind. From 102 multinational corporations which have been surveyed, with at least 10,000 employees, it was found that 45 percent have adopted cloud computing, compared to only 28 percent last year.

So it seems that after much hype and discussion, cloud services are moving from concept to reality, and CIOs now have to make important decisions on where data should be stored, to best suit their organisations, the type of data they handle and, importantly, their strategies moving forward. The challenge now is not only where to begin, but more importantly, which cloud option best suits your business?

The hybrid option

Of course, moving to the cloud doesn’t have to be all about a wholesale, lock, stock and barrel shift. Most organisations may prefer to keep core applications in-house and move the less ‘critical’ apps to the cloud. Whilst the cloud can, of course, offer many cost and operational advantages there is still some reluctance from organisations to store their mission‐sensitive information, such as financial or strategic planning data on the public cloud.

In all likelihood, many organisations will choose the ’middle way’ that is, adopt a hybrid cloud model which has the ability to relay data and logic from core enterprise applications that are on-premise to other applications that reside in the cloud. In this way, organisations can decide which information stays on their internal network and which information can be carried across to the public cloud. This model gives organisations the power of choice and allows them to deploy applications and data where and when necessary.

So while we’d expect that a significant proportion of applications will remain on premise for some years, ready or not, the cloud will have a dramatic impact on the way we plan provision, create and deploy applications in the future. So the challenge for CIOs is how does this work in reality? Where do businesses begin in combining the mix of on-premise, public and private cloud applications?

Furthermore, how do CIOs ensure that they protect investments made in the past, all the while ensuring longevity of new investments?

Making the hybrid cloud a reality

Part of this begins with future-proofing applications so that they are cloud-ready, be they third party or legacy. New approaches, in the form of application platforms, are providing organisations with the ability to deploy in multiple channels and with this approach, developers, whether in-house or ISVs, can now develop an application for the desktop, take that particular code, and move to a different engine and develop it on the cloud or on their mobile devices, without having to re-write from scratch.

The same application, which doesn’t necessarily have to be written in-house but could also include existing applications such as ERP or CRM, can run in the cloud, on premise, on mobile or on a combination of all three. For the hybrid model, for example, organisations can run the same application on the cloud and on mobile devices from exactly the same codebase. This also means that organisations can benefit from cloud computing without having to make all the decisions now on what they should move to the cloud. It also means that they can gradually migrate applications to cloud environments, while protecting investments in existing business logic developed.

So as CIO’s now go through the process of determining which applications they should move, how this fits in with their IT assets and infrastructure and the cost benefits that can be achieved, they can factor in that they do in fact have the power of choice; there are ways for them to have the flexibility to deploy their applications on-premise, or in the private cloud, public cloud, or both – and even switch from one to the other simply and cost-efficiently as and when business needs change.

www.magicsoftware.com

In the current climate, increasing IT spend is very difficult and can often only be achieved by reducing the amount spent on IT operations, or so-called ‘keeping the lights on’. While one-off cost-cutting provides a starter, the real gain is in improving IT efficiency – but how easy is this to achieve?

A good starting point is to calculate the budget spent on IT operations (typically around 70 to 85 percent) and use this as a baseline to measure progress over time. As much of these day-to-day IT operations costs are people-based, the most effective strategy is to make these individuals more efficient by ensuring business and operational processes are supported with software tools – a method which is often dubbed ‘IT process re-engineering’. The initial focus should centre on the biggest cost centre or people groups, such as the service desk, the server administration team or application support.

Once an IT process has been identified, the improvement or re-engineering process should start with the key performance indicator that measures the improvement. For the service desk, this could be the service desk cost per support user. As typically 85 percent of the cost of the service desk is people-related, the focus should centre on how to improve their productivity and efficiency.

Implementing a new service desk tool will have no impact on this at all, so the focus should be on implementing new processes that can be supported by the tool, starting with the most time consuming and inefficient parts of the process. Understanding how the service desk are spending their time is key.

Worthwhile considerations might include; ‘can multiple service desks be consolidated across businesses or regions or functions?’; ‘How much time are the service desk spending communicating updates to customers?’; ‘What are the frequent, repetitive incidents?’; ‘How much time is spent interfacing with the second or third line and ‘how much manual re-tying is there between systems?’

In this respect, IT process re-engineering is similar to business process re-engineering that was made popular in the ’90s by Hammer. Crucially, it involves evaluating whether existing processes are needed and undertaken and whether the root-cause of issues can be tackled. For example, if a service desk spends lots of time tackling laptop issues then, given laptops can take up to ten times the effort to support than desktops, does the IT organisation have more laptops than is needed?

Simplification

Essentially, IT process re-engineering is about simplifying processes, standardising and then automating. It’s important to stress that this is not about gathering detailed requirements and then building or customising a tool to support this as this approach is too slow, lacks flexibility and has a high cost of maintenance. Instead using a tool to drive best practice and standardisation through ‘out of the box’ features is the best strategic approach. Having a ‘platform’ tool that combines multiple modules such as service desk, change and configuration management, configuration management database (CMDB) etc also helps, as it removes the need for the many point-to-point integrations needed to automate processes. In many ways, this is not unlike the way that ERP systems are used.

When it is focused on people-intensive areas, driving process simplification, standardisation and automation IT, process re-engineering has a real and significant potential to reduce the budget required IT operations, freeing critical spend for strategic and business-enabling projects. In its simplest terms, to get the maximum return on IT investments, organisations must put people first and concentrate on making processes more efficient within the IT operations department.

www.fusion.co.uk

Process checklist

A successful IT-enabled process – should have the following characteristics:

Key performance indicator: Whether it is based on cost/efficiency, quality, service or customer satisfaction (or a combination), knowing how well the process is being performed is essential.

Standardisation: The process must be implemented consistently across the organisation. If staff are trained in the technology but not the process, it will be performed in different ways leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

Integrate the process: Ensure the process is embedded into the systems, rather than being an add-on. This should result in total adherence to the process and increased likelihood of project success.

Out with the old: The process depends on systems, but good systems don’t automatically replace bad practices. Too many organisations fall into the trap of buying new systems and customising them to deliver the old, inefficient processes.

Be clear from the outset: To be successful, the process should be precise and based on clear instructions rather than general guidelines. Lack of supporting work instructions and definitions can lead to processes being performed inconsistently and mean that reporting data cannot be relied upon

Measuring a return on investment (ROI) for any part of a business can be a strain at the best of times. The complexity increases if it means altering legacy decisions or apparent established wisdom. For an organisation to work truly effectively it must realise and tackle its operational efficiencies and present relevant value; return on investment, value on Investment, or total cost of ownership, generically referred to as the ROI report.

The ROI report is often the backbone in supporting a business’ decision or objective to encourage some level of change. This could be a change in technology, resources, business processes – the list is endless.

Each industry, organisation and department has varying methods of defining ROI. The IT Service Management (ITSM) industry is no different; albeit there are common themes between verticals and challenges. The problem is that ITSM ROI reports are usually collated by the IT team and by default are commonly presented by, for and in the language of IT. The challenge for ITSM professionals is to accurately represent ROI to support the business objective and subsequently induce change.

 Presenting financial information

The IT person typically has little financial background or organisational fiscal understanding, and so is focused on delivering an IT message in justification of an IT recommendation. This makes the understanding and relevance of an ITSM ROI report, outside of the IT sphere, very difficult.

This is compounded by the inherent nature of IT to steer away from finding hard facts during research and information gathering. Many reasons feed this behaviour, including resource availability, access to company and department finances, understanding how costs are assigned, non-visibility of individual and departmental value to the company, and inability to gather data – through non-availability, resistance, and fear of what will be found.

However, the reality is that factual data is an essential part of any ROI report. This integral data includes: volumes, costs and revenue impacts; change costs for technology, resources and consulting; the time period in which the organisation expects to see a return and what the increased throughput is expected to be. Critically, and often not planned for, is how these metrics and measurements will be tracked and who will be accountable.

Another challenge is presented in the way IT professionals interpret data, it is often dependant on their background. Entry into the industry through, for example, data centre, problem resolution, operational transition or business analysts, will ‘command’ the view of how a person takes on financial figures.

It is essential for IT professionals to grasp the necessity for these hard facts to be recognised, understood and presented accurately in an ROI report. This is only the starting point though. To substantiate the change to the business the presentation of this data must also be fit for purpose.

Looking beyond the IT sphere

IT Service Management programmes have the ability to return real organisational value. The challenge for the ITSM industry is being able to find it, validate it, gain organisational agreement, make the ROI relevant, be able to track and demonstrate it.

To do this, the focus needs to be on understanding how to find relevant metrics, operational benefits and key performance indicators. All these key activities are driven to ensure that the ROI is sound, owned, and substantiates business needs and challenges. However this cannot be achieved without giving consideration to spheres of the business outside of IT.

When a technology professional is evaluating ROI, they are often doing so in isolation rather than considering the whole company. On that basis, one has to question the true relevance of many ITSM ROI reports as they stand today.

If a report fails to consider other business streams, including HR, finance and facilities, and is drafted with an IT management audience in mind, rather than the operational management teams (who will expect reports to be in layman’s business terms) then it will have little relevance to the rest of the organisation and hold little credibility.

To successfully present improvement value, an ITSM ROI report must come out of the silo to reach beyond the boundaries of IT and demonstrate operational improvement values. After all, it is almost impossible for operational efficiency programmes to substantiate the effort, investment and change without bringing to the attention the organisational benefits.

Bringing silos together

The purpose of an ROI report should not be the justification of recommendations for a pre-defined answer. The real (and factual) costs of an outage, incident or failed change must be understood in order to demonstrate the true ROI value, and as such, substantiate business need and activities such as change, project initiation, or product implementations.

Good and skilled as technology professionals are, they now need to be more than IT people and intrinsically understand the relevance of an ITSM ROI programme and its importance to a company – in short, the business objective.

If an IT person was asked to associate their bonus, income or performance milestones to their ability to realise the ROI set out, then one would expect that person to give thorough consideration to how and why the ROI can be achieved. In that vein, we cannot expect an organisation’s management teams to commit funds or establish improvement plans unless they had made those same considerations.

For the commitment to be given by management teams, the presented value within an ITSM ROI report must be both meaningful and relevant to the business. Only then can the ROI induce some level of change, and the ITSM industry can begin to efficiently plan for, present and realise ROI savings.

A prevailing industry question is whether an ITSM standard for ROI reporting could negate the problems with IT professionals in putting together reports which appear to be unfit for purpose. Although the concept of ROI is feasible, the plethora of variables makes a standard view unattainable. But one thing is clear – ROI must be brought out of the silo and into the heart of the business, with IT focusing on the ‘how to find’ and ‘what ROI looks like’ rather than ‘what it is’.

http://www.iccm.co.uk/

With wireless technologies becoming increasingly pervasive in the marketplace, companies may be looking to these as a key business driver for 2012. But before any investment is made, it’s important to take stock of the reasons for your businesses to go wireless in the first place. What technologies are currently available, where are they used, and what concrete benefits do they bring? In exploring this, the true value of wireless for your business can be determined, and the right purchase can be made.

Worth the investment?

Local Area Networks (LANs) run on wire cable. Wire is expensive to install and difficult to reconfigure for changes in the production environment. It does not allow for mobility, and there are certain places it simply cannot go. For instance, running cable throughout a factory floor is extremely difficult if not impossible. Because of these limitations, WLANs (wireless LANs) have become a hot commodity, revolutionising the way we work and do business today.

Data applications running over wireless networks can be found everywhere in our daily lives. They are particularly attractive to industries where certain functions are difficult to perform because of large areas, harsh operating conditions, or other restrictions. For example, wireless applications are ideally suited for pharmaceutical manufacturing applications, where an ultra-clean environment is required to monitor, control, and configure equipment.

The real-world benefits of wireless, however, can be seen across almost every industry. Some specific examples include the following:

Healthcare: The medical and healthcare industries are aggressively seeking productivity gains as a result of the current nursing and doctor shortage. With this situation expected to worsen as baby boomers age and require more care, an increasing number of medical and healthcare industries are modifying their processes by building convincing wireless return on investment (ROI) models. Use of computer-based physician order entry (CPOE) and barcode scanning for medications is expected to expand over the next few years and wireless communications networks are essential to their success.

As news of medical mistakes become more public, wireless applications are also becoming a key component in improving accuracy and quality of care in hospitals. Now hospital emergency-room doctors can examine a seriously injured patient, order x-rays, have the patient transferred to surgery, and receive the x-rays electronically in the operating room. In addition, physicians can remotely check a patient’s status, test results, medication schedules, or other information based on up-to-date entries made by nurses on their rounds. Quality of care improves dramatically as patient information is more accessible wirelessly and as more accurate information is recorded by immediate record keeping.

Retail: Retailers are seeking ways to improve productivity, reduce costs, and generate incremental revenue. WLANs and the applications that run over them offer proven solutions. Popular examples include multimedia kiosks and self-service displays that employ audio, video, animation, and graphics to run point of sale (POS) and information applications. By improving the timeliness and flow of information, these wireless solutions lead to better overall customer satisfaction and increased profitability.

A major music store, for example, has set up wireless kiosks that provide real-time streaming of music videos, seasonal fashion displays, ticket-selling services, local web access, on-line music sampling, and other content residing on a video server.

In the future, retailers will be able to install RFID (radio frequency identification device) readers into their store shelves. With these readers, retailers will have the capability to detect when the shelves are empty and need to be restocked – all via wireless communication.

Transport: Before wireless, checking in a rental car was a lengthy procedure that took far too long. In addition, the mass of paperwork that had to be manually entered on a daily basis was getting out of control. Worse still, returned vehicles would stay on the premises for hours before being able to be turned around and re-rented. These companies needed a real-time solution to help improve their rental-return process, and WLANs are allowing them to accomplish strategic business goals in new and innovative ways.

For example, to reduce the costs of vehicle damage, a major rental-car agency is using a wireless system that allows damaged cars to be inspected and an appraisal prepared within two minutes. The company estimates that it will save millions of pounds per year on unrecovered costs. It also ensures that crucial customer information and signatures are not lost.

Manufacturing: Productivity improvements; inventory management; and quality control. All are common challenges found in virtually every manufacturing facility today. From automotive to warehouse environments, the need to attach essential devices such as PLCs, CNC/DNC equipment, process and quality control equipment, pump controllers, barcode operator displays, scales and weighing stations, printers and machine vision systems is common. Wireless networks offer the solution for all these challenges.

For example, a major facility control centre had problems operating process-control equipment on a legacy network that was independent of the LAN. To network-enable all of the process control equipment at the support centre would have required more than 1,500 feet of wiring and conduit spanning multiple buildings. Instead, wireless device servers have been integrated to Ethernet-enable all of the equipment in the support centre. This solution also delivers significant time-savings, as over 500 PCs in the support centre have access to real-time information as it is generated by the process control equipment. This eliminates the need for a technician to patrol the floor and monitor each device individually, and speeds the response time when a failure occurs.

These examples prove that businesses of all types are finding that wireless networks meet the high availability and capacity requirements needed for their specific applications. Once a decision is made to deploy a wireless system, the overriding question then becomes one of standards.

Surveying the wireless landscape

Today’s popular wireless-networking standards are various and can prove very difficult to choose between. There are, however, important differences that are worth exploring in greater detail:

900MHz technology: This is an unlicensed spectrum that has been commonly and traditionally used for portable phones, microwaves and wireless internet services.

Internationally, the 900 MHz band is widely used for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile telephone systems or military communications. As a result, companies with sites around the globe cannot standardise on 900MHz-based solutions for all locations. But the 900MHz band suffers from a lack of interoperability, as vendors employ proprietary radio protocols. The industry, on the other hand, is moving towards standards-based systems, with multi-vendor support for common WLAN infrastructures. By contrast, Wi-Fi consumers are not restricted to a single vendor for upgrades and expansion of their WLAN systems.

Wi-Fi: In a mixed wireless network environment, it is important to select standards- based wireless products that are able to exchange and use information. Wi-Fi is a generic term that refers to any type of 802.11 network, the term is promoted by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Therefore, any products tested and approved as ‘Wi-Fi Certified®’ by the Wi-Fi Alliance are certified as interoperable with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers. A user with a Wi-Fi Certified product can also use any brand of access point with any other brand of client hardware that is also Wi-Fi certified. Users benefit from this interoperability by not being locked into one vendor’s solution.

Bluetooth: Named after the Viking, Harald Bluetooth, bluetooth is a short-range (10 metre) frequency-hopping protocol that links devices. Designed to operate in noisy frequency environments, bluetooth uses a fast acknowledgement and frequency-hopping scheme to make a link robust. It avoids interference from other signals by hopping to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving a packet. Compared with other systems in the same frequency band, bluetooth hops faster and uses shorter packets. As a short-range, low-cost, wireless solution, bluetooth requires less operating power than most other devices. However, because it shares a specific radio spectrum, there is potential for interference with consumer appliances that operate in the same spectrum, such as cordless phones, microwaves and baby monitors.

Bedding in the right solution

Over the past decade, wireless local area networks have played a key role in revolutionising the use of technology in our society. In the office and at home, and now across most business infrastructures, wireless connectivity is permeating every aspect of our lives. But as has been demonstrated, there are an abundance of complexities associated with wireless connectivity. The effort involved in understanding this technology and bringing it to embedded solutions can be daunting, time-consuming and expensive.  It is therefore important for organisations to seek out providers that can simplify the process. To capitalise on the growth in this space, they need a convenient, cost- effective, and easy-to-install solution for adding wireless connectivity to their embedded designs. Finding a provider that offers the flexibility to suit specific wireless requirements, with the ability to add connectivity modules to any product quickly and easily, is an important place to start.

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