This case study focuses on the importance of IT and IT service management to the success of the US Department of the Interior (DoI) and how using the strengths of ITIL enabled them to develop a customer-centric culture and to reduce their costs. Utilizing ITIL also helped the DoI meet their IT challenge and deliver integrated service management which ensures value to the customer and meets the challenges of government and IT in providing improved services that are also cheaper and faster.
The US Department of the Interior (DOI) is a Cabinet-level agency that manages the United States America’s natural and cultural resources for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people. The DOI also provides scientific and other information about natural resources and natural hazards to address societal challenges and create opportunities for the American people. Finally, it honours the trust’s responsibilities and special commitments of the US to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and affiliated island communities to help them prosper.
The DOI consists of 10 bureaus and eight offices, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management. One of the offices, the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), leads the DOI and its bureaus in all areas of information management and technology. The OCIO employs 70,000 people across its offices and has 280,000 volunteers in 2,400 operating locations. Its employees include expert scientists and resource-management professionals.
NuAxis, an IT infrastructure support contractor for the US Federal Government, began supporting the OCIO’s IT service desk in 2010, managing desktop and customer support centres and providing services to maintain the DOI’s business operations.
The objectives of this work were to address:
- investment in technology
- next generation technologies
- the effectiveness, efficiency, and cost reductions achieved via best practice, including ITIL®
- siloed working and the demarcation between tiers of the business.
The OCIO provides services to the DOI’s bureaus and offices and wanted to support better ways of working. Ultimately, the purpose of the agreement with NuAxis was to provide end users with better services and achieve savings worth billions of U.S dollars. Now, the focus has shifted to maintaining relationships with customers.
Bob Roark, Vice President Service Management at NuAxis, explains the challenges presented by the OCIO and the successes, recommendations and outcomes of the engagement.
He says: ‘There is substantial pressure for the government to reduce IT spending. It does not want to spend money changing tools, technologies, or frameworks in which they have already invested. At the same time, IT support groups are staffed with competent people who want to do the right thing for users but often do not think or cannot act outside their own group functions and activities.
‘If you put the customer’s wants, needs and desires at the centre of all you do, using the strengths of existing tools, technologies and frameworks including ITIL, you will be on the right side of a multi-billion dollar cost savings initiative.
‘ITIL is at the core of integrated service management and will continue to be a major part of the strategic response as US Government IT responds to new challenges and ways of working.’
Within the OCIO, the help desk and managed desktop support operations provide quality services and efficient IT solutions to 300,000 DOI end users and external federal agencies. The DOI requires the support of robust and mature computer operations and technical support programs to provide the services needed to maintain business operations conducted by the DOI and its customers.
As a contractor to the DOI, NuAxis provides solution-driven IT infrastructure support including all neces- sary personnel, services, and facilities to utilize the existing technical infrastructure, collaborate effectively with the US government, integrate seamlessly with other support contractors and introduce tools and infrastructure enhancements that drive efficiency and automation to reduce cost.
The biggest challenge facing government IT is the need to provide services to customers that are better, faster, and cheaper. This can be done by:
- improving efficiency and effectiveness
- reducing IT support cost
- providing faster and more reliable services
- identifying, utilizing and effectively implementing emerging, next generation technologies
- maintaining and improving customer focused relationships to:
- ensure customers receive the correct response to their inquiry or request for assistance in one interaction
- ensure staff are motivated, productive, highly skilled, self-driven and professional to meet all service level agreement (SLA) and performance requirements
- provide economies of scale by strategically aligning similar services
- ensure high quality, consistent and timely service and an integrated solution that results in optimized performance, effective utilization of technology, and streamlined processes to provide the most efficient and effective suite of services.
It was these solutions that NuAxis was faced with during the implementation.
NuAxis undertook a project to improve the DOI’s services, which was carried out over several steps.
5.1 INITIAL ASSESSMENT
At the initial assessment stage of the project the main aim was to understand what the DOI’s customers wanted. To do this, NuAxis talked to stakeholders to get a clear picture of what success would look like and gain a greater insight into what all end users were trying to achieve. This also gave NuAxis a better understanding of existing ways of working, including culture, common language, and communications across silos.
After that, the project deployed industry standards, including ITIL, to assess the maturity level of the IT environment. Once this was established, the ITIL framework was used to support and improve the maturity of the DOI’s IT services. This involved choosing the top three to five areas to focus on and finding short, mid, and long term improvements for each.
5.2 ADOPTION
The project focused initially on getting quick and high impact wins to gain momentum. One important area of focus was hiring, training, and certifying staff. This is a challenge in any situation where a project inherits existing people, especially, as in this case, where there had not been an emphasis on providing end-to-end solutions.
All staff need to train and certify with HDI, which is a strategic partner with AXELOS, the custodians of ITIL that includes ITIL processes and service support.
A skills gap analysis identified the existing level of capability and how that capability would support a higher level of ITIL maturity along with present and future technologies.
ITIL’s approach of focusing on the customer in an end-to-end process was important when considering how to hire the right staff. Cultural fit and customer service ethos were essential to getting the right people onto the team, building trust, and doing things better.
5.3 CONTINUAL SERVICE IMPROVEMENT
Alongside ITIL’s seven-step continual service improvement process, the project consistently returned to the maturity assessment made at the beginning to ensure that it was focused on the right things. The initial areas of focus for improvement were handled quickly. Therefore, the project needed to identify further recommendations for improvements that could be made as technology evolved.
5.4 ITIL GUIDING PRINCIPLES
The ITIL guiding principles supported the project by promoting a focus on what was important to the customer, centred on value, continual communication, delivering cost-effective services, leveraging existing tools and documents, and keeping it simple. Utilizing these principles allowed NuAxis to make more effective maturity recommendation and assisted the DOI OCIO in prioritizing the selection of initiatives in areas that made the most sense for their business needs.
NuAxis’ recommendations moved solutions closer to the customer. This is to prevent customers being passed from one technical tier group to another, ensuring that their issues are resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible. The result of this more efficient and faster solution is that customer satisfaction increases.
Following the ITIL framework and focusing on developing a customer-centric culture has improved all areas of support and increased the overall value perception of IT delivery.
Integrated service management ensures value to the customer and meets the current and future challenges of government IT in providing improved services that are faster and cheaper.
Other outcomes of NuAxis’ work included:
- increased alignment of similar services within the DOI
- reduced ‘wall of confusion’ and better teamwork, particularly increased mutual understanding and collaboration between groups to deliver better services to customers.
- reduced employee turnover
- meeting all the DOI OCIO contractual SLAs for this specific contract
- increased first level resolutions.
A new survey for the DOI OCIO’s customers was developed as part of the project. It focuses on delivery of value to the customer and includes measurements based on meeting the DOI OCIO’s customers’ business needs.
With a greater ability to understand customer outcomes, it is now possible for the DOI to identify and resolve the root cause of problems in its services.
ITIL is also providing the DOI with the foundation to use a number of other best practice approaches including Lean, Agile, and DevOps.
Bob Roark said: ‘ITIL provides a foundation block on which everything else is built; it provides structure, definition, and gets everybody speaking the same language. You can’t really do anything without ITIL in terms of being able to scale. ITIL provides both a language and processes, ensuring consistent delivery to the customer and meeting their expectations.
‘ITIL is at the core of all frameworks and provides the structure and central language for them to succeed. All of these are important and no one framework alone is more important than any other, nor can they be fully successful on their own in a vacuum or silo.’
Top ITIL Do’s
- Make use of relationship management. This is key to ensuring successful adoption and understanding customer needs.
- Encourage communication. It is essential to demonstrate to people how to be focused and promote value, how to connect with end users, and recognize their function within the context of the whole organization.
- Consider that ITIL is not prescriptive. Pick and choose what applies to your customer and be aware that every step in the process does not need to be followed in order for it to work.
- Understand the maturity of the environment and make recommendations for those gaps. Focus on quick wins first (low risk, high impact) to gain momentum.
- Become an organization that supports a customer-centric culture. The customer defines what value is from their own expectations. Therefore, you need to understand the customer’s expectations.
Top ITIL Don’ts
- Don’t assume that everybody knows what you are talking about. You may need to introduce key ITIL concepts to those who are unfamiliar with the framework.
- Don’t forget about senior leadership. It is critical that you gain senior leadership support as a prerequisite for success.
- Don’t assume organizational change will happen because you have a project charter and a deadline. Take the time to plan for the people side of any change and engage staff early and often to ensure success.
- Don’t focus on ITIL compliance over the business value. ITIL is a framework designed to help in providing value to, and as perceived by, the customer. Complying with any process or framework is not the intrinsic value.
- Don’t randomly choose every available CSF, KPI or SLA. There are a number of metrics and industry data available for each today. Choose only those CSFs, KPIs and SLAs that further a specific outcome that drives value to your customer. Remember that value is derived from the customer’s perspective, not IT’s.
Bob Roark is a service management and leadership executive with a broad range of technical and business experience across multiple industries.
He is VP of Service Management for NuAxis Innovations, a solution-driven support organization that encompasses information technology, management consulting, and healthcare services with offices in Washington D.C. and Denver, Colorado, and more than 450 team members across 22 states. At NuAxis, his role is to help transform and optimize customer experience (CX) via integrated service management, smart talent leadership, and designing a customer-centric culture in both the NuAxis team and their customers’ organizations.
Bob is an MBA graduate of Western Governors University, recipient of a CX Impact Award for Outstanding Professionals from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), AXELOS Ambassador, bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and recognized as one of America’s PremierExperts™.
He holds numerous industry-leading certifications including ITIL v3 Expert, Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Project Management Professional (PMP), HDI Support Center Director (SCD), Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MSCE), and ISACA - Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA).
[email protected]
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bobroark/
NuAxis Innovations: www.nuaxis.com
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