Enterprise companies tackle the arduous task of implementing organizational change across distributed networks.
CHICAGO – Two years into his IT service management implementation at Nationwide Insurance, Doug LeMaster came across a prop skeleton with a sign around its neck declaring, “ITIL is dead!” in the area occupied by the company’s network group.
The message – referring to the practices of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL ) – mocked the efforts LeMaster, director of IT program management, began in 2002 to move some 5,000 IT professionals toward consistent management processes that would ultimately enable the Columbus, Ohio, insurance provider to significantly increase IT service availability. But the image stays with him, as a reminder of how difficult IT organizational change can be if managers don’t balance efforts proportionally across people, process and technology.
“The biggest pitfall is not recognizing the people element. You have to keep that triangle balanced. It’s easy for the pendulum to swing too heavily on the process and technology sides and overlook the people component,” LeMaster says.
Last week LeMaster and numerous other IT managers told their best practices and service management stories to some 2,000 attendees at the fifth annual IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) USA conference in Chicago. The show featured presentations by companies such as Allstate Insurance, Bank of America, Ernst & Young, General Motors, Liberty Mutual Insurance, State Farm Insurance and U.S. Bank, to name a few. Such household names are a testament to the growing interest in IT best practices among U.S. companies.
The ITSMF USA has doubled its membership from about 1,600 in 2004 to more than 3,000 today, and the organization’s local interest groups have grown from 20 sprinkled across the country last year to 31 in 2005. Based on data collected from market research firms, ITSMF officials project that the number of companies adopting best practices in the U.S. could continue to grow from about 30% this year to 75% by 2007.
The ITSMF provides resources for companies to learn more about best practices frameworks such as the ITIL, Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology, the Capability Maturity Model and Six Sigma, all of which provide guidelines on how IT staff members should resolve a customer complaint, configure routers or track changes across a server farm, while also documenting the process, for instance.
“We do not have one location or one manufacturing depot not running at capacity. We are so interconnected, so interdependent that we have to give ourselves a fighting chance when problem solving. IT service management provides that,” John Heller, CIO and vice president for the Systems and Processes Division at Caterpillar in Peoria, Ill., told conference attendees during his keynote speech.
“We recently had a challenge with Zotob [a worm targeting Windows 2000-based systems] and for a period of time we lost control of our network. Now how good does that feel?” Heller said. “If you are trying to create a process or pin down who is in charge of the incident in the middle of the crisis, then you are in deep yogurt.”
Yet as interest grows, so does the number of reality checks IT managers have experienced when trying to reach best practices nirvana. While details varied among IT managers, the message remained the same. Adopting a best practices framework is hard, time-consuming and challenging to even the best leader trying to compel IT staff to comply with enterprise-wide process change.
Nationwide Insurance throttled back its rollout of ITIL processes such as release management this year to help the company mature the already implemented process improvements, which include incident, problem, change, and configuration management.
“You have to assess how much change your organization can absorb and pay attention to the stresses people are experiencing or you will have passive resistance, in which people will circumvent the process, and the effort will fail,” he says.
One way to get over the personnel pushback is through financial reward. Nationwide incorporated adherence-to-process objectives into its compensation and bonus plans for employees. LeMaster says making compliance not only mandatory but also personally beneficial to employees can help speed the adoption curve.
“You don’t want to have to browbeat people into compliance, but by building process compliance into personal performance objectives it does improve the focus,” LeMaster says. “As an organization moving from systems management to service management, we’ve changed our focus from service availability to understanding customer impact.”
Bob Paniagua, change control manager at AutoNation in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says change management processes were adopted at his company, specifically to get in front of auditor requirements in Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. But, he adds, comprehensive upfront work could help reduce the inevitable pushback many IT organizations experience when rolling out massive changes companywide.
“When you encounter pushback, you have to let them speak so you can understand their resistance,” he says. “Also, I can’t write the change management processes for every IT function. I needed to get the departments to work with me, document for me the processes that would work based on their jobs and incorporate that into the overall framework.”
Chris Overton, senior technology planner for JM Family Enterprises (JMFE) in Deerfield Beach, Fla., encourages writing out lengthy internal processes and then whittling them to fit into a common set of guidelines as opposed to depending on external sources for process definition.
“Anyone can take a class and say they are ITIL-certified, but no consultant can structure the processes to fit your business needs,” he says. “You have to document your own processes.”
While others would argue that ITIL-certification requirements are quite stringent, Overton makes a point. His company worked to roll out four clustered ITIL processes – incident, problem, change and configuration management – at an accelerated pace (about four months). The goal was to establish the service desk as the single point of contact. JMFE supports and provides IT services for automotive dealerships distributed across the southeastern U.S. Following the process upgrades, his team wasn’t able to accurately calculate how many service calls the front-line support desk could expect or could handle.
“Hold times went up, no-answer times went up, ticket queues went up and overall calls went up,” Overton says.
Rather than ruling out the ITIL guidelines as a loss, he explains that after the increase in calls to the service desk – which he bases on not accounting for the number of times internal customers walked over to an IT staff member or called them directly without going through the service desk – JMFE reconfigured their processes to include additional steps.
For example, the company instituted 10-minute call limits for front-line support to resolve an issue before passing it up to second-tier staff. JMFE also made it mandatory for IT staff to update complaining customers on the status of their tickets when a resolution did not occur within pre-defined time limits.
“The speed bump we hit was in not having common processes to address these types of issues,” Overton says. “We had to get various stakeholders involved that knew the business and knew IT to ensure the processes would work across the entire organization.”
