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IT at your service
Analysis: Time for a change of culture?

By Danny Bradbury

Published: Wednesday 09 January 2008

For some IT directors, getting the trust and respect they feel they deserve in the boardroom can be difficult. One answer may to be move the computing department to a services culture, says Danny Bradbury.

Years of inflated budgets, problematic projects and underperformance in IT have left senior business managers wary of technology - if, indeed, they ever understood it at all. How can IT departments stop the rot and get the business to value them more?

Moving to a services culture, in which IT is seen as providing a portfolio of discrete and understandable services to business, is a crucial part of reconditioning corporate perspectives on IT.

Part of that process involves treating business departments like customers and providing them with the same type of consistent service that they might find from an external provider of IT or other services, say experts.

"IT must become much less seat-of-the-pants, and much more consistent. It must become much more about meeting expectations and exceeding them," says Philip Everson, partner in consulting at Deloitte. "It's about being much more polished and accurate in estimating."

But how do IT departments get there? Business tends to value what it has to pay for, and so business departments may attribute more value to IT if they have to pay for what it gives them.

"I remember paying for mainframe time based on logged-on hours on the terminal and on CPU cycles," says Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca. How could such charging mechanisms apply today?

Charging someone for mainframe time certainly won't fly but charging them a set fee for internet access, PC maintenance and VoIP services or at least knowing how much those services are worth to a business might.

Charging them access to CPU time spent crunching numbers for business intelligence might, too. And perhaps then the marketing department might refine their queries so that they didn't chew through processing time so needlessly and subsequently criticise IT for underperforming.

Ideally, IT would be a services-led department like any other, providing business managers with a catalogue of different services that they can pay for piecemeal, so that everyone understood what they were getting and how much it was worth. But there are dangers in this, warns Bamforth.

In his mainframe days, he remembers that a couple of departments got together and bought their own minicomputer to provide services locally. "The danger is that if the pricing isn't set right, and if there aren't advantages in using that approach, people will try to get around the problem," he says.

That brings in all kinds of governance problems - having marketing install its own server on the network and failing to maintain it properly is asking for trouble.

One way of surmounting that problem is to ensure an IT department's processes are configured for efficiency and for consistency when it comes to customer service, says Everson. That is something that is sorely lacking in many companies.

"The IT organisation is often one of the few parts of a modern business where you can ask someone to do something on a Tuesday and again on a Thursday, and different things happen because you've spoken to different people," he says.

Consistency, integrity and reliability are inherent characteristics of a good service. Again, where does the IT department start?

"There are standards available. Whether it's Capability Maturity Model Integration, or Itil in the service delivery part, or Cobit, which is more of a compliance and control standard," says Everson.

Methodologies such as Itil are designed to be dipped into - to inform an IT department's services strategy. You don't buy the Itil library and follow it from cover to cover. Rather, you use the parts of it that make sense for your operation.

Putting proper processes in place at the back end can help to refine an IT department's services and create consistency for the customer. Perhaps then, when a business department asks for 500GB more storage next year, an IT department will be able to dip into an overprovisioned SAN and find the capacity immediately, rather than imposing lengthy delays while it procures and configures another physical volume.

But reaching that level of capability isn't enough, warns Nick Caplan, group chief marketing officer at LogicaCMG. Caplan advocates what he calls outcome-based services.

"People too often tend to look at it on an input basis. They'll say, 'You need 10 PCs or 100GB more storage'," he says. "That's not the service. My job is to ensure that we work out what the components are to deliver that most effectively to you." The IT department can then deliver a service reflecting the outcome that the business needs, at a set price.

That level of capability then paves the way for the extension of the service model in the other direction, as IT departments outsource the mundane technical work to third parties and concentrate on the business analysis that is central to service provision.

The IT department becomes a crucial part of a supply chain - the primary contractor that aggregates underlying technical services and adds the intelligence on top to deliver it in a way that is understandable to the business. Then, hopefully, the service will leave everyone with a smile.