The human touch

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When migrating to a new data center architecture, the technology easily can captivate a network executive. After all, who isn't lured by the promise of lower costs and automated management? Don't be misled, warns Henry Piaskowski, IS director for Swedish Medical Center, a 7,000-employee nonprofit healthcare provider for the Pacific Northwest. If you want to avoid injuring your migration efforts, you must first focus on your people and your processes, he advises.

The Seattle healthcare provider is nearing the end of a two and a half-year, $12.5 million project that moves it from aging technology to a model virtualized infrastructure. The undertaking, which will effect every point on the network including desktops, servers, back-office applications, storage and management, will ready Swedish for a new clinical information system (CIS). When Swedish wraps up the infrastructure project at year-end, it will be ready to host its new CIS. (The CIS, to be deployed in a separate project, will grant healthcare workers better access to patient records no matter where doctors and patients roam among the healthcare systems' 15 primary locations.)

Yet as exciting as the new systems are, the moment Piaskowski and his staff identified the requisite application, server and storage virtualization technologies, Piaskowski paused. He realized the technology would be useless if the staff wasn't prepared. IT needed to turn away from a break/fix mode and toward proactive management. To do that, Piaskowski and his team needed to adopt best practice standards and reorganize the IS staff.

So Swedish's first major investment wasn't in a fancy new product, but in its people and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ). "We required all management in IS go through ITIL training. As part of the process side, we wanted to make sure we were rolling the new infrastructure out right," Piaskowski says.

For instance, IS management used ITIL to design best practices, standardized incident response procedures, says Don Iverson, manager, IT infrastructure for Swedish.

Before the IT upgrade, "if we became aware of an incident, we would react in an ad-hoc way. Now we have documented processes that the department follows to report the incident all the way through resolution, and to identify the resources that are needed," he says.

As managers designed procedures, they saw that people often had overlapping or ambiguous roles. To man that incident response team and every other station spelled out by ITIL standards, IT managers would need to rethink job responsibilities.

"Within the IS organization, there's daily production - keeping services delivered to users - and there's development/engineering/building types of work. The way we were organized before, people were expected to do all of those things," Iverson says.

So after Piaskowski and his management team conducted analysis, they broke job descriptions into three levels: decision making, communication and accountability. Then they divvied up each role into the corresponding functions of strategic, tactical and operational, or what Piaskowski calls the "what, how and do" of the role.