Nearly everyone needs to improve IT Operations’ efficiency and virtually
Hello Fellow Bloggers-
I have had the opportunity to speak two times in the last 3 weeks–once in a webinar on the Business Value of IT Change Management, and how it Leverages ITIL Success, and another leading a session at HP Software Forum 2006 in Miami–on Getting the Business Value from an Enterprise Change Management Program.
But I didn’t want to talk about those specifically other than to bring up two questions I asked which may be of interest to you. Here is the first question.
1) Do you have a requirement to lower the cost of IT Operations and invest the savings in driving more strategic projects?
a) Nope, don’t have it.
b) Yes, but we are overstaffed and can make cuts to meet the need.
c) Yes, we believe we need to improve the efficiency of IT Operations, but don’t have a clear strategy for doing so.
Out of 245 polled, 93% answered “c”.
The second question had a little “tee up” like this. For large IT organizations, is it reasonable to say you have 5 or 6 things you may do 7000-10,000 times per year - for instance, security changes, minor software programming changes (15-50 hours), operating system upgrades, server upgrades, changes to integrations, etc, - which cross 3 or more technical silos of IT to get done.
Most felt they did. I then shared some pretty common Business Process Re- engineering (BPR) stats for processes that have never been base lined and re-engineered. Such as efficiency gains of 20-40%, and cycle time reductions between 40-80%.
Finally–here’s the question.
2) How many of you have base-lined the current process for even one of your high volume processes?
Answer - out of 40 or so attendees, none had.
So here’s the sweeping Blog conclusion–Nearly everyone needs to improve IT Operations’ efficiency and virtually no one has a real strategy for doing so. Leveraging ITIL to transform IT operations is really just BPR for IT. You should see efficiency gains of 20-40%, and cycle time reductions between 40-80%. So make that the focus of your ITIL efforts. In order to best prove it, some high level baselines should be documented, the processes re-engineered, automated through technology, and the outcomes measured.
Have fun out there and check out our new White Paper on “Developing the Business Value for ITIL”.
Don
—–