* Southern Company IT pro shares his thoughts on when to customize and when not
As many IT professionals know all too well, heavily customizing an IT service management tool isn’t a good idea. In fact, customization can be a real killer.
Taking heed from peers who have been there, David Traynor, manager of business excellence at Southern Company, says he’s determined not to make that mistake as he takes this Atlanta-based electric utility deeper into IT Infrastructure Library-aligned service management processes. In the summer of 2009, Southern Company implemented asset, change and configuration management processes via BMC Remedy ITSM software, and is now working on incident, problem, request and service catalog components for implementation in about a year’s time, Traynor says.
“We’re doing our best to stay as close to out of box as we can,” he says. “We do customizations only when after a heavy decision-making process. We need to make sure we really want to do the customization and, if so, that we document it very well so that when we move to a new version we can do an upgrade easily.”
As Southern Company implemented enterprise change management, for example, it limited customizations to six, and ultimately decided to back out of one of those, Traynor says. “One of the changes we made seemed nice initially but ended up being too complicated,” he adds.
With the current initiative, proof-of-concept testing gave rise to nine customization requests, says Traynor, explaining that subject matter experts from across IT disciplines assess how their business processes work based on the initial tool configuration his team devises. Evaluations of those requests are underway now, he adds.
“As we evaluate, we try to determine if there are process workarounds. We ask, ‘Is there be a report we can produce that might take care of this customization? Is this something available in another tab that the user just isn’t familiar with yet?’ and, most importantly, ‘Is this something that we truly need to be more effective in how we run the business?'” he says.
He bears in mind a recent saying he heard, that culture eats process for lunch, Traynor says.
“We’re a utility. When customers flip a switch they expect the lights to come on. That’s our core business, and we have the same perspective from an IT standpoint. When people flip the IT switch, we want to make sure their applications work,” he says.
“We need to make sure the decisions we make help support our core business, that they’re helping to keep incidents to a minimum and resolution quick. Changes have to be solid, and not impact customers during rollouts,” he adds. “We’re talking about pretty heavy scrutiny as we evaluate potential customizations; we want to make sure future upgrades are as seamless as possible.”
To those peers who may be less inclined to do such due diligence on their ITSM deployments, Traynor has this to say: “You can’t just focus on the technology. Your processes, people and technology all need to be in sync. You can never underestimate the impact to the people.”
How heavily are your ITSM tools customized — and has that proven more good or bad? Tell me about your experiences with ITSM customization and upgrades.
