Link Alander and Shah Ardalan from the Lone Star College System (LSCS) gave this presentation. LSCS has over 65,000 students and is growing at 5-8% a year.
They initially had difficulty in instituting metrics; IT in particular had been dodging measurement since Y2K--saying they were too busy, or that IT was changing too quickly. They have four particular areas of focus:
- IT Governance: a formal governance structure and a strategic plan for IT
- Guiding Principles: customer satisfaction, five nines, and enterprise standards
- KPIs: Financial, Operational, and Strategic
- Open Executive Reporting
They spoke very favorably of a book, "Measuring ITIL." They wanted to increase accountability in IT, monitor and track their performance, and provide meaningful information to executives and their Board of Trustees.
They keep a "wall of shame" for recent outages. They try to calculate the severity of an outage by its potential impact, the time of day, and the impact duration. They have created all types of metrics, e.g. the percentage of systems with an Energy Star 5 rating.
Since measuring they have reduced their average speed to answer a call from 2:29 to 0:36, and reduced their abandon rate from 21% to 2%.
They communicate metrics in three venues:
- a monthly executive overview
- a quarterly customer newsletter
- Student Welcome Back information at the beginning of each semester
They now have an Executive Director of Client Relations. They do a lot of work in surveying, forums, and group sessions to collect customer feedback.
They are still working on Service Level Management; for now they say that tier I services should have 99.999% uptime; tier II services should have 99.99% uptime, and tier III services should have 99.9% uptime. Their external service providers can't meet LSCS's uptime requirements.
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