Toyota unit gets ITIL right second time around

Toyota Financial Services made two efforts to make the best practices laid out in ITIL work

Not every IT effort is a success the first time around.

Toyota Financial Services’ initial attempt to adopt the best practices laid out in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) fell short when lackluster results stalled the project. Instead of giving up, IT executives refocused their efforts and made sure they had adequate support from employee ranks.

It all started when Toyota Financial Services found itself in a position to build an IT organization from the ground up. Executives didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to build their group on best practices.

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Not every IT effort is a success the first time around.

Toyota Financial Services’ initial attempt to adopt the best practices laid out in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) fell short when lackluster results stalled the project. Instead of giving up, IT executives refocused their efforts and made sure they had adequate support from employee ranks.

It all started when Toyota Financial Services found itself in a position to build an IT organization from the ground up. Executives didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to build their group on best practices.

"We didn't have any service management processes in place and saw it as a unique opportunity to put good practices in place and grow them as the organization grew," says Dave Howard, national business technology manager for Toyota Financial Services in Torrance, Calif. "It was our first time being in control of our own destiny, so to speak, and we thought it made sense to look into process frameworks."

Toyota Financial Services had separated its IT division from that of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. for business reasons in 2000, but hadn't solidified an IT service-management strategy until 2002 or 2003, Howard says. The team started investigating best-practices frameworks and looked into ITIL more closely for several reasons.

"We liked ITIL because it was a vendor-agnostic, generic set of best practices that were mostly descriptive and not prescriptive," Howard explains. "We felt it could fit the needs of a small or larger organization and be flexible enough not to dictate to us which tools we needed to reach our objectives."

With about 3,000 users to support, Howard says the team's first objective was establishing a service desk. On top of that, incident, change, configuration and release management ideally would follow. Toyota Financial Services' initial stab at ITIL fell flat, however.

"We failed at the beginning to show the benefits of adopting these good practices to the organization overall," which ultimately stalled the first attempt at rolling out ITIL, he explains. Howard's team in 2004 refocused its approach to adopting ITIL and reports more success today. "We needed to realize ITIL was not a quick fix and ramp up our marketing and educational efforts. We also started highlighting the small wins we achieved," he says.

For its second time around, the company established a service management group and assigned ownership of the processes to that group. Making a team accountable for the processes helped keep them on track and made incremental improvements more tangible. "We were trying to implement our service management processes without a centralized group around service management, so the goals and objectives were not properly aligned," he says.

As for results, Howard says his organization is seeing several improvements in terms of availability, reliability, quality and stability of IT applications and infrastructure. For instance, in the case of release management, IT staffers don't have to "go back and reinvent the wheel" for every application rollout. They can use the same established process, with tweaks here and there, which speeds the deployment time and keeps users happier. "Consistency breeds efficiencies," he says.