Victoria White, the Fermilab CIO, gave this talk. Her group maintains "classic IT," the infrastructure, and the R&D supporting Fermilab's research. She did a really good job of explaining their environment, e.g. they have over 16 petabytes of research data. Their users expect 24x7 service and uptime.
Essentially she threw down the gauntlet to her IT shop to gain ISO 20000 compliance by the end of calendar year 2010. This works well in her environment because they are used to having to comply to standards, and they have a lot of creative, techy staff who enjoy challenges and problem solving. She wanted to reduce cost, increase efficiency, increase the quality of service, support critical lab functions, stabilize their environment, standardize services and support, and be the first Department of Energy lab certified in ISO 20000. This concrete goal also helped get the CEO on board.
Their consulting company helped them conduct a baseline, which showed they had essentially no process for anything besides security management. They laid out an AGGRESSIVE roadmap to implement processes.
After having begun to follow their roadmap, a quality assurance auditor visited and only wrote up two positive things about Fermilab, one of which was supporting IT's problem management prcoess.
I asked whether ISO 20000 compliance was a hygiene factor rather than a motivational factor, and she said that after people are exposed to the concepts they start to own them and see their value, making them want to excel and improve the process.
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