Kentucky IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Program

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1 2006 NASCIO Recognition Awards Nomination Category: Enterprise IT Management Initiatives Kentucky IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Program Commonwealth Office of Technology. KentuckyUnbridledSpirit.com An Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D

2 Executive Summary Since its creation in late 2004, the Commonwealth Office of Technology (COT) has been charged with expanding beyond a provider-driven organization to provide technology leadership from an enterprise perspective. Today COT s vision is one of a world-class service organization driven by process. COT consistently advances the vision of an enterprise approach to technology in state government, delivering a robust, consistent infrastructure, and greater efficiencies in the development and delivery of technology solutions. COT initiatives are improving the productivity of COT customers within state government, improving the lives of Kentucky citizens, and increasing the profitability of businesses in Kentucky. COT has an integral role in many areas of state government, from helping to develop e- government services for the state's Web site, kentucky.gov, to rolling out the second generation of Kentucky's Information Highway, which delivers telecommunications services to all 120 Kentucky counties. COT is also developing best practices for technology in the areas of IT security, homeland security, criminal justice, telehealth, Geographic Information Systems and public safety. With this vision in mind, COT sought best practices for managing a service-driven IT organization. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework was chosen to be the basis of this transformation. ITIL and IT Service Management (ITSM) were developed by the British government as a definitive resource and set of best practices for managing IT services. Today, ITIL initiatives are used in most fortune 500 companies. COT is leading the ITIL movement in the public sector. Goals of the ITIL Program in Kentucky Transform COT into a service organization driven by process Improve service reliability Manage infrastructure changes to protect services Decrease the adverse impact that changes have on customer satisfaction Establish procedures for change management, configuration management, release management, incident management, problem management, service management, and control processes Empower the Change Advisory Board Develop and deliver a complete ITIL / ITSM training plan The commonwealth s ITIL Program began in October To date, the program has successfully re-engineered the commonwealth s change processes, built an integrated Service Center, and completed the first phase of a multi-generational ITIL education program. The ITIL program is transforming COT into an IT service provider focused on automating where it makes sense, and eliminating redundancy and single points of failure wherever possible. One of the driving factors in the adoption of ITIL is the ongoing effort to consolidate IT operations to a central point within the enterprise. The project s goal is to take advantage of cost savings by eliminating redundant services, applications, and hardware. The ITIL framework was chosen as the best practice methodology. 2

3 Project Description The COT ITIL program was formed in September of Its formation included two ongoing projects; an integrated Service Center effort and the installation of an integrated toolset. The change project, focused on the formation of a CAB and defining processes and procedure, and a large training effort designed to certify all COT management at the ITIL foundation level, were undertaken at the same time. Before ITIL, there was not a consistent definition as to what constituted a change or what various terms meant. Therefore, requests were implemented without following an enterprise-wide standard or predefined process. When a formal change request was submitted, there was not a consistent set of processes in place to ensure all changes were received, logged, assessed, and classified. There were as many approaches to assessing, authorizing, and scheduling changes as there were different types of changes in COT. There were many teams doing change management and the only connection they had was through a weekly Change Control Meeting that output little more than a change calendar. No standard risk model was being followed to ensure all changes were assessed for their potential to cause service interruptions. IT support groups regularly made changes to production systems to restore service with little, if any, consideration as to the possible cascading effect that the change could have in the environment. Limited resources existed to accomplish proper testing of requested changes. There was inconsistency with how to report service requests, incidents, and change requests. In some cases, the requester contacted the Help Desk, in others, the requester contacted the support person and/or support group by phone or . This led to few incidents being tracked with the service desk tool. Customers were not sure who to call, which resulted in multiple informal Help Desks. Minimal standards and poorly defined processes led to inconsistent service to the customer, inefficient use of technical resources, and delays in resolving incidents, problems, and service requests. The lack of a defined process and central toolset made reporting difficult if not impossible. With the onset of the consolidation project, solutions were developed to address these weaknesses. Through the implementation of a Change Advisory Board (CAB) and an updated change policy, COT has been able to reduce unplanned outages and decrease the adverse impact to service and infrastructure that 3

4 software releases and configuration changes have on customer satisfaction. An integrated toolset, which enforces the approval process and assists in the communication of the status of an incident or request, was installed and change and incident processes were configured. Through the implementation of an integrated Service Center, COT has centralized all Service Center functions and dramatically increased the number of incidents captured, which allows for continuous process improvement. COT staffed the new Service Center with higher skilled employees able to perform more troubleshooting, freeing the more skilled staff members from tasks that could be addressed by others. A service level management system has been implemented for response time and resolution time on incident and service requests. Based on the priority of the ticket, managers and service level managers are notified via from the integrated toolset to ensure that incidents are being resolved in a timely fashion. Reporting was developed to track incidents and requests and record the impact on the infrastructure and services to our customer. Significance to the improvement of the operation of government Implementation of ITIL best practices in the incident and change management processes has resulted in the several improvements for our customers and users. The implementations of the CAB and integrated toolset have resulted in a reduction in the number of failed changes and outages resulting from poorly implemented changes. Changes are now scheduled to allow for the least impact and most effective use of staff. The Service Center is handling 200% more incidents and service requests without an increase in the size of the staff. This jump in productivity is a direct result of two things -- the single point of contact for IT requests, and the additional technical training provided to Service Center staff. The single point of contact allows all service requests to be tracked in a centralized CMDB, which allows the Service Center to build a comprehensive support knowledge base. In turn, this knowledge base allows the Service Center to resolve more first-time calls. Additionally, the technical training allows Service Center staff to handle IT requests that would previously have been passed on to higher level technical support. 4

5 The Service Center is now handling a greater variety of service calls than in years past. This allows the more technical, higher level support staff to focus on more advanced support issues. The ability to track all incidents in a single CMDB allows the Service Center to provide more accurate reports to management. It also allows change management to monitor unauthorized change to the COT infrastructure, resulting in better financial and technical resource decisions Benefits realized by service recipients, taxpayers, agency or state With the many improvements in service support recognized by the implementation of the ITIL framework, customers are realizing a number of benefits. One of the most immediate benefits was improved communication with the customer requesting service. In the past, customers had to call different places to request service depending on the type of service needed. Providing a single point of contact has greatly increased communication between COT support staff and the customer. One example is that the new call tracking system utilized by the Service Center automatically escalates aging tickets to the support staff and upper management, notifying them when tickets are approaching set SLA levels. The result is that more calls are being handled within specified SLA s and customers are experiencing a higher level of service. The ITIL program has increased the reliability of services that directly benefit citizens, such as Automated Vehicle Information System (AVIS), resulting in fewer service disruptions and improved delivery of services. Application development is fully integrated into the change management process, resulting in more reliable implementations and fewer failed changes have resulted in the capacity to manage more change. With the increased ability of the Service Center to handle a wider variety of calls, customers are experiencing faster turnaround times on service requests. Now more calls are being handled by the Service Center, instead of being passed on to higher level support staff. Implementation of the ITIL framework has allowed for earlier incident identification resulting in a reduced disruption of critical services to citizens. One example occurred recently on Election Day. Proactive incident management identified and resolved issues early without disrupting the election results Web site. 5

6 Realized return on investment, short-term/long-term payback (include summary calculations) The integrated Service Center currently handles 20,000 incident tickets per month with a staff of 6 full time employees and 1 part time employee. Comprehensive statistics are not available for the months prior to the implementation of the ITIL program, since all incidents were not necessarily recorded or handled by the help desk. In December 2004, a staff of 6 recorded 280 tickets per month. Although not a scientific comparison, this is an increase of more than 700% in total number of incidents and requests recorded. As the consolidation project continues and new users are brought on board, the Service Center has been able to accommodate hundreds of new users with no additional staff, a testimonial to the productivity the ITIL program has brought to COT incident management. The cost of a failed change is often difficult to calculate for even the best managed IT operations, but COT is taking aggressive steps to address this. The ITIL program has an ongoing initiative to address financial reporting. Detailed reporting was recently implemented that will allow COT to assess the potential impact of every failed change or incident to the user, agency, and cabinet. When the CMDB is fully implemented, COT will be able to calculate the return on investment, both short term and long term. 6