University ITSM

Below are notes from today's itSMF USA Higher Education SIG round table conversation.

Round table participants

Janine Roeth, UC Santa Cruz, moderator

Erin (?), UC Santa Cruz

• questions & answers for service definition
• service catalog
• incident management, service desk, change management

Bob Black, University of Miami, Ohio

• service catalog
• monitor cost
• articulate value
• service request management

Dennis Ravenelle, Harvard University

• project management
• change management
• driven out of audit requirements

Thelma Simons, University of Kansas

• change management
• limited problem management

How to link services to costs?

UC Santa Cruz's original ITSM implementation was based on needing to reduce IT's costs. Now they are faced with a 10% budget cut. Determining the costs of service catalog entries: it's difficult. No one knows how to tie costs to service catalog entries. The service catalog can be used as a taxonomy to talk about cost, and the level of service.

It is difficult to identify infrastructure costs and apply them to a specific service since so much of the infrastructure is shared.

Assessment of IT quality

Harvard's Remedy change management module includes rating each completed change. "Excellent" changes have transparent impact. "Good" changes have a planned, communicated user impact. "Acceptable:" no unplanned impact, the change was successful within time window. "Problematic:" Successful change, but there was an unplanned service interruption or the change was not complete by the end of the window. "Failed" change. Five levels in total. There will now be a way to show the impact of changes and show improvement.

Little assessment now except in change management. They have various levels of changes, showing the number of changes and the urgency of changes. Successful, unsuccessful changes.

Have your metrics produced changes? If not, maybe you're not paying attention or not measuring the right things.

People don't have outcome-based metrics.

Don't measure service quality through incident management. Silence does not equate tosatisfaction--something could be broken and people don't call. People don't call when they're happy. Important to focus on the customer and the problem at hand, and be persistent.

Tools being used?

Miami-Ohio: Incident: Alteris Help Desk (sp?), change: home-grown change control database, catalog: Drupal. Other departments use incident management tool too.

University of Kansas: Remedy 6.0, Rolled their own service catalog. Remedy

UC Santa Cruz: Incident: web-based tool "Web Help Desk," change: Jera (sp?), an open source tool. Service catalog: HTML + PHP templates. Incident used only by IT.

Harvard University: Incident and change: Remedy 7 (was Remedy 5 before), no service catalog--just HTML pages.

Particular shorcuts, templates, or tools in use?

Harvard needed to customize Remedy. They have an in-house Remedy developer who customized around Remedy tools so upgrades are not impacted. Customizations can be very expensive.

Pre-defined tasks are helpful for the things people have to do often.

The process of reviewing templates and then creating your own is very important. The process of developing templates is worthwhile.

Campaigning for change management and process improvements

The process of implementing the process was in itself very valuable. CAB meetings came first: CAB members were the stakeholders in the process.

Implementations that don't involve people don't get the same successes. Sometimes people don't fill out a change request with enough information, or just make changes without approval.

UC Santa Cruz has "divisional liaisons" that make relationships with the other areas outside of IT.

Establishing the ownership over the lifecycle of an incident. When someone calls with an issue, once it gets into the first point of contact's hands, it's the first point of contact's responsibility to see the issue through to completion.

There needs to be management backing that if a change affects a service and it didn't go through change management then that action will be addressed.

Shifting the language from ITSM to "service excellence" or another term

The State of North Carolina's implementation does not mention ITIL. Harvard talks about Service Excellence, not ITIL or ITSM. People want to hear about excellent service.

ITIL isn't the end--talking about ITIL can be problematic. Talk more in terms of outcomes! Educating people about ITIL has perhaps made it harder to think in terms of outcomes.

Divisional liasions

Divisional liasions don't necessary talk about ITIL. They talk about service quality. The focus is on customer-friendly language. The ITIL-speak is "behind the curtain."

Examples of value for Universities

What makes an institution successful is the growth that enables undergraduates to pursue successful careers.

ITIL v2 was about delivering IT services. Most of us are still at that point. ITIL v3 is about aligning to business services. We have a lot to do there.

How can we tie student success to IT value?

Research as a driver?

Grants are expected to fund their own infrastructure. They often have their own silo.

People want IT to be invisible. How does IT show its transparency as a "good thing" rather than something that can do nothing besides break.

Defining IT markets

Right now the market is--don't go out of business! In the state of Ohio, the governor has said that higher education's budget will not get cut. However, tuition is a big factor and changing demographics mean that universities have to find new students. There is certainly a competitive element to Universities.

Universities are taking on more students than ever, with fewer staff and equipment.

Fields are becoming more IT focused and need more IT resources. For example, biology faculty need computing resources because their work is computational. Research seems like a growing market for university IT.

Moving services to the cloud

Harvard is creating incentives for services that can be hosted via Amazon EC2.

Opportunities for ITSM

The service catalog helps identify redundant services.

People who will be successful will need to understand "the business"--what the University is trying to achieve. People will need to be less data-driven and more process-driven. Finance and cost assessment skills will be very helpful.

We will all be asked to do more with less. Technology can help Universities do that. By being creative in helping the University's business run, we are showing IT's value.

ITSM helps us work smarter, not harder. As we mature in service management we can draw lines between IT services and the business.