Structured Approach
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of rules for how to deliver IT services more efficiently by improving management processes across IT departments that support networks, applications, databases and systems.Gartner Australasia research director John Roberts says when it comes to service delivery many Australian government departments and organisations are adopting the ITIL standard to help them achieve standard, reliable and reproducible processes - and to help the CIO move up the "credibility curve". Roberts says securing such credibility depends on the CIO's ability to develop more of a service provider relationship with clients, so they can better understand what he or she is delivering. "The standard processes are not a bad way to start in terms of helping that along."
AXA Australia CIO Ian Campbell certainly thinks so. AXA has been following the ITIL general methodology broadly for about three-and-a-half years in its pursuit of improved service delivery and reduced unit costs. Campbell says ITIL provides organisations with generic service delivery processes like help desk, problem management, configuration management and capacity planning which they can map or modify according to their organisational structure and goals.
"We've used it to underpin our service delivery performance," Campbell says. "It probably helped us to reduce some costs and to look down the track a bit, particularly in the areas of capacity planning. The more consistent a methodology you follow, the more it just becomes ingrained into the organisation. It just becomes a way of doing business."
Campbell says having a methodology to follow helps to overcome attitudes like: "We don't do it that way here." Having transparency of results provides credibility.
META Group senior program director electronic business strategies John Brand says designing around the customer experience has proven to be the best driver for process re-engineering over the past five or so years.
He says those organisations that entered CRM from a "360 degree view of the customer" perspective have largely been the ones which have failed. Those which realised that the customer's 360 degree view of the company was much more important were able to avoid many of the internal political barriers. "There are some great examples out there of successful organisations that were able to use customer experience design principles combined with integrated supplier sourcing strategies to provide superior customer service while actually reducing operational costs," he says.
Toll Holdings is one of them. Rossington says Toll is effectively providing visibility into its own supply chain for a major customer, having dealt with the business challenges relating to the point at which it provides transaction visibility, the amount of data the customer's customers should be allowed to see and which data should be restricted. He says successfully achieving such a result meant carefully considering process from the customer's point of view before systems development began.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.