Case Study: European Telecoms Provider – Mission Critical ITIL Process Change
Our client is a former state telecoms provider and now offers a range of products around voice, data and internet services. Their IT division delivers technology systems and support to the company’s main business units.
“Over the last few years, we have been transforming our IT processes and infrastructure to meet the challenges of growing customer demands and expectations, as well as streamlining delivery,” explained our client’s CIO. “We needed to respond to these challenges by providing higher and more consistent levels of service and support for business critical systems in a highly cost-conscious business environment.”
Our IT division has implemented several process improvement initiatives to improve the quality of the delivery and support of services to its customers. One of the improvement initiatives involved enhancing the existing Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes and at the same time the organisation also addressed the ISO/IEC 20000 Global IT Service Management Standard requirements, which is the first worldwide standard specifically aimed at IT Service Management.
With the twin aims of building a compliant framework and focusing on opportunities for process improvement, the IT division identified several gaps in processes and documentation that needed to be addressed. It selected Original Solutions, now part of Perot Systems, to drive this, as the company had already demonstrated an ability to deliver best practices in IT, improving internal controls and implementing continuing process improvement. The project involved a collaboration of Perot Systems consultants working closely with the client’s management and staff, with audit input to ensure that process builds and improvements not only met the regulatory requirements, but were workable on the ground. Perot Systems successfully put in place the changes to resolve the control gaps that were identified on time and to budget.
Key business drivers of ISO/IEC 20000 are to reinforce and provide formal accreditation, based on internationally adopted ITIL best practice guidelines and provide a formal and auditable standard for the delivery of IT services within an organisation. “ISO/IEC 20000 certification allows companies to demonstrate a real commitment to IT quality, and by being ISO/IEC 20000 certified, a company can show that they don’t just pay lip service to the statement ‘ITIL Compliant’, but that they are truly ITIL compliant,” said Kieran Aylward, senior business consultant at Perot Systems.
“Perot Systems worked with our IT division to build on and add to the ITIL processes that had already been implemented,” added the client’s CIO. “They carried out training and ensured that the project experience was positive for all. An independent audit on our core IT processes was undertaken in December 2006 and all processes were deemed to have not only met the requirements, but exceeded them in some situations,” he said.
According to our client’s CIO, the main advantages his organisation expects to see are an improvement in the service to customers and in systems availability, “though it will take some time for these to be realised,” he added. “Once people understand the processes and are fully complying with them, then the whole continuous improvement side begins to kick in as they identify better, faster and cheaper ways of doing things.”
Our client now has core ITIL processes, which will deliver ongoing measurable business dividends for the entire organisation. “We will be embedding the changes and monitoring the success of this project over the coming months. Once we have confirmed the benefits realisation, we will look at expanding the scope of the ITIL implementation,” the CIO.