When one of the largest universities in North America decided to enhance its IT service management (ITSM) capabilities, it quickly became clear that there were too many chefs in the kitchen. The experts at Emtec were able to provide a recipe for success.
ITSM is a discipline for managing the delivery of technology with a focus on end-user needs and business value. Over the years, the university had developed a somewhat fragmented approach to IT service. A dozen or more different IT groups had sprouted up using a variety of open-source management and reporting toolsets to serve many different pockets of the faculty, student and administration.
As part of an effort to consolidate its IT resources and streamline its processes, the university issued an RFP inviting solution providers to bid on a project for implementing one common toolset — BMC Software’s Remedy ITSM suite. Emtec submitted the winning bid, but quickly found the university had much more on its plate than a straightforward tool implementation.
“One issue was that the people who authored the RFP were no longer around. Those who were left were kind of blindsided and not sure what toolsets and processes they had in place. Another was that they thought there were common processes, training and documentation in place, but once the project was underway, quickly realized that was not the case,” said Luc Bouchard, Emtec’s Director of ITSM Consulting Services. “They had 2 IT departments and 12 service desks, all operating in totally different ways with different tools and processes. They were operationally, geographically and departmentally fractured. The disparate systems did not allow for sharing of information (i.e. metrics of calls, etc.). They were in pure reactive mode doing what they could with tools they had.”
Bigger Fish to Fry
This is an unfortunately common scenario when it comes to ITSM. “If we would have just come in and implemented a tool, it would have eventually led to failure”, said Bouchard. At its core, ITSM is ultimately about solving end-user issues quickly, ensuring appropriate uptime and making sure changes are properly managed. It is more about ensuring tight business processes than a piece of software or technology. Using ITSM to solve these issues isn’t as simple as installing a tool and linking it to a database.
When ITSM programs don’t meet organizational expectations, it is almost always due to a lack of upfront planning. Beyond tool selection and implementation, a good ITSM plan must address issues such as process development, cultural resistance, organizational change, employee training and ongoing process governance.
Emtec found those ingredients lacking.
“Each time we asked a question, we’d get 12 different answers,” said Bouchard. “So we had to put on the brakes on the Remedy tool implementation and do some process reengineering.”
Food for Thought
Outside the scope of the original engagement, Emtec set up a series of workshops designed to formalize and document the processes that would provide the basis for university-wide incident and change management procedures.
Equally important, the workshops allowed Emtec to break down pockets of cultural resistance to change by getting each of the satellite IT shops involved. Each division liked their process, so why change? Handling emotional change management is a must in these projects. Consensus-building exercises ensured that each group used common verbiage, handled problem tickets in the same fashion and used the same processes for reviewing, approving and implementing changes.
“We were able to bring everyone to the table to discuss the Remedy tool and processes built into the tool,” said Bouchard. “We listened to their specific needs and got everyone to agree that this is the tool, these are the agreed upon procedures and this is the way information will be tracked. We were then able to move forward.”
“They now have one central tool used by all of the service desks. With a single tool, a single process and a single language they can now work cooperatively,” said Bouchard. “They can now pass tickets from central to satellite locations easily. All the information they extract is also now consolidated in one place for transparency across the board. They can generate reports for the full university or for a single department. It is a positive approach for their future.”
This information enables them to make proactive decisions about what might need to change to improve overall IT performance, rather than simply reacting to problems and issues as they arise. The university now has 4-5 months of data that can be analyzed in the tool. This visibility is deal changing. One recent example is the sheer number of password-user credentials calls they can now see they are receiving. A potential password tool to help reduce/eliminate calls is now in the works.
Emtec also provided ITIL foundation training that was recorded, and is referred back to even now on regular basis.
Proof is in the Pudding
Having acquired a taste for Emtec’s comprehensive approach to ITSM planning and implementation, the university has now engaged Emtec to continue providing Tier 1 support for BMC Remedy issues and has proposed additional projects to enhance its service management abilities. These proposals include having Emtec develop a more detailed CMDB (Configuration Management Database) as well as an online service catalog. These features could eventually enable the creation of an automated self-service ITSM portal through which end-users can bypass the service desk and look up frequent issues, log incidents or check on the status of a ticket themselves. That would be the icing on the cake.
More than half of organizations still spend the majority of their time in unproductive data preparation and quality assurance processes rather than in applying business analytics to gain the most value from their data, according to a recent benchmark study by Ventana Research. The study involved input from more than 2,850 organizations.
Despite the obvious value of analytics and the ready availability of analytics tools, the study found that the application of analytics remains a spreadsheet-based activity in 88 percent of organizations. Yet these same organizations report issues with data accuracy and timeliness of analytics, and find themselves at a competitive disadvantage against the most mature organizations that are using predictive analytics to help determine future outcomes and mobile technologies to simplify access to analytics and metrics.
The study found that business and IT organizations use a variety of analytics, but they have not yet automated many of the underlying data integration and analytics operations needed to generate metrics. Moreover, the study found that businesses largely are not acting to improve their processes. The research indicates that that only a third of organizations are planning to change the way they generate and apply analytics in the next 12 to 18 months.
What organizations desire most is the ability to search for relevant analytics and metrics that answer business questions. Businesses also want to be able to drill down into the causes of situations by performing root-cause analysis and to be able to collaborate in reviewing analytics. These are capabilities not readily available to organizations that rely heavily on spreadsheets as analytics tools or data sources. Not surprisingly, the research finds that a quarter of those organizations are not happy with their existing technology.
