Technology was once exclusive to glass-walled environments where experts in lab coats tended mysterious machines. Although computers have since lost much of their mystique, there still remains a figurative glass wall between the IT organizations that implement, manage and deliver technology services and the business users who depend on those services to do their jobs. Health First, the largest healthcare provider on Florida’s “Space Coast,” is taking steps to shatter that glass wall once and for all.
In an effort to more closely align IT with operational and business objectives, Health First recently engaged Emtec’s consulting group to lay the groundwork for a value-based management (VBM) approach to technology. Health First’s overall vision is to create a more formal link between IT infrastructure and business performance, thus removing historical communication barriers and creating a service-focused IT organization. Ultimately that will allow employees to quickly get what they want and managers to easily demonstrate what services are in demand, what services are being provided and what those services actually cost.
“We still have work to do — Rome wasn’t built in a day — but we are making significant progress,” said Jose Lanza, supervisor of support and operations for Health First’s IT department. “We have a much better understanding of where we are and where we need to go because of the work we’ve done with Emtec over the past year.”
Growth and organizational change caused Health First to rethink its traditional approach to IT service and consider how to more efficiently develop, operate and deliver services with value and alignment to the business.
Headquartered in Brevard County, Fla., Health First manages a network of hospitals, administrative offices and outpatient centers, along with a large medical group and a host of other facilities and services. The IT department provides services and support to more than 7,500 end users, including employees, administrators, physicians and medical staff.
For several years, Health First has relied on an out-of-the-box software suite to provide an IT service management framework. However, the organization was looking at a forklift upgrade to replace an outdated version of the application that was no longer being supported by the vendor. What’s more, the organization had undergone significant transformation since the application was first implemented. It no longer made sense to look at IT as an isolated service — in fact, Health First logically wanted to group IT with a broad range of other support services that are critical to the daily function of a healthcare organization. This includes plant operations, clinical engineering, environmental services, physical security and more.
“Health First has numerous doctors’ offices, hospitals and other facilities, and all of these people have pages and pages of contact phone numbers to call for support issues,” said Andrew Braden, IT Service Management Consultant for Emtec. “There’s one number to call if a printer isn’t working, another if there’s a problem with a monitor or an IV pump, and another to call if the toilet is plugged. Our goal is to help Health First make their end users’ life easier by giving them one place to go for their support needs.”
Having previously engaged Emtec to help with its service management software implementation, Health First was impressed with the firm’s VBM methodology and its extensive experience with linking business-related services to underlying applications, workloads and infrastructure components to deliver greater insight into how technology assets are impacting business.
Since Health First wanted to address not only IT services but the full range of its support services across the organization, Emtec suggested an initial focus on developing the service catalog elements of VBM. A service catalog is a database or structured document with information about all live services and services planned for delivery. It includes information about deliverables, contact points, prices, ordering and request processes. This is an essential first step because the catalog provides the means for making decisions about the deployment of resources, services and dollars in order to meet the business goals in the most cost-effective manner.
While developing such a catalog might seem to be fairly straightforward, it is not without challenges. One of the biggest hurdles is reaching agreement on what constitutes a “service.” Most organizations struggle with defining services — in fact, industry experts say about 30 percent of all service improvement projects stall because of this roadblock. Services are just not documented on paper. The information is all in the support personnel’s heads. They know what they need to do and just do their jobs.
Emtec helped Health First get past this initial hurdle. Over the course of many VBM engagements, Emtec has developed a services library that contains approximately 80 percent of the typical services that most IT organizations provide. Using this library as a framework, Emtec conducted more than 30 one-hour interviews with key employees and stakeholders across seven different Health First support areas.
From these interviews, a master list of services was created. The graphic below represents a mapping of the various service categories across Health First’s seven support streams (support services groups). Under these support streams are 21 support categories with a total of 63 distinct services defined (not pictured) that were mapped from interviews with stakeholders. This master list of services serves as an outline for the full scope of data required to create Health First’s Service Catalog.
Emtec also delivered an overall assessment of Health First’s VBM readiness, including a list of the gaps in the service delivery that Health First can use to target improvements. Together with service definitions and value assignments, this information essentially provides Health First with a template on how to continue the process of developing its service catalog. To ensure effective knowledge transfer, Emtec also conducted workshops with managers and directors throughout the organization, and provided detailed workbooks on how to continue the process.
“Emtec’s assessment helped Health First management recognize how large the scope of this project really is and the process needed to get where they want to be,” said Braden. “Since then, people throughout the organization have become very interested in the process and are more receptive to helping, ” said Lanza.
Lanza continues to count on Emtec for help in developing the service catalog, and Health First would ultimately like to use the catalog to create a self-service Web portal where employees can access a menu of available services and make service requests.
“We’re still at the beginning stages, but we can now see where we’re headed,” said Lanza.
