Improvement guaranteed

Running an IT function can be a thankless task. Providing day to day operational support to the business ties up people and costs, yet despite that users are often dissatisfied and the Finance Director makes sure he lets you know that he thinks it’s all too expensive.

Meanwhile, the business is pushing you to deliver new, innovative solutions to strategic issues it believes are essential to its competitiveness, such as improving time to market or on utilising online technologies to lower transactional costs.

If you have IT users, you have to provide IT support – and because infrastructures are often a very mixed bag of technologies, and because people’s knowledge differs enormously, that support can be expensive. Then there are change projects. These too often take a long time to secure approval, or they go over budget, or don’t deliver anything like the anticipated business benefits.

Next are the personnel issues. Support still relies too much on personal interventions by skilled professionals – who may leave and take their knowledge with them. Understandably, many IT professionals are protective of their knowledge, as it represents their market value. Lose them and they will be costly to replace.

In recent years, it’s become accepted that the delivery of IT services needs to become far more standardised. Too much is bespoke – a common approach is needed, but with the capability to flex to organisations’ changing requirements.

Essentially, IT managers, especially in the current economic climate, are looking to streamline their support functions – running a far more efficient operation that reduces costs while keeping their users happy. At the same time they need to be able to offer the business predictable timescales and outcomes from their projects – such as server consolidations or a migration to a new operating system. Efficiencies in these areas will also enable the IT department to focus on the big, business-critical projects that will ultimately deliver to the company’s bottom line.

Stricter governance
One solution is to outsource some or all of the IT function to a specialist organisation. The acquisition and retention of the right skills then becomes their problem, and you should be able to apply stricter governance through an SLA based contractual obligation than perhaps you could in-house.

But all too often that just shifts the problem elsewhere. Choose the wrong partner, and your outsourcer may face the same pockets of jealously guarded specialist knowledge and have exactly the same difficulty in predicting outcomes. It’s still very common for service delivery to be personal skills-led, rather than driven by common processes and methodologies. Moreover, you may well be paying a premium for that service.

Things are beginning to change, as industry analysts Ovum SystemHouse noted at the beginning of this year, “We will see an acceleration in the industrialisation of IT services… The reasons are simple: customers demand value (i.e. quality at lower cost) and reliable solutions with predictability on a global scale.”

What is needed is an approach that takes the highly standardised and repeatable approach that has long been a given in the manufacturing industries and applies it to the delivery of IT services.

The partnership with Computacenter enables us to align IT more closely to the business and delivers tangible results at lower and predictable costs.

Industrialising service delivery
Although relatively new to service delivery, the use of standard processes and delivery elements is common in manufacturing. Take the Volkswagen Group. They offer a wide choice - you can buy a luxury Audi, a durable Volkswagen, a stylish SEAT or an economical Skoda. But whichever car you choose, certain components, and most of the build processes, will be common to all the brands. It means Volkswagen can ensure a high and consistent level of quality, which is what their customers want, and reduce the amount of bespoke design – which matters to Volkswagen because it lowers their costs and keeps them competitive.

Fortunately the standards that can provide the foundation for such an approach in services delivery are already well-known. ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a comprehensive set of guidelines documentation that represents best practice for IT service management.

Delivery model
For some years now, Computacenter has been using a delivery model that is based on these standards and which leverages its over 25 years’ experience in the IT services business. It calls this model, and the people, tools and processes of which it is comprised, the Shared Services Factory (SSF).

Approximately £30 million has been invested in the SSF, which is designed to reduce costs, improve quality, mitigate risk and gives Computacenter’s customers a firm basis for continual service improvement.

Computacenter customers such as Marks and Spencer are already seeing the benefits of this approach, as Damone Quigley, head of Infrastructure and Application Services at M&S acknowledges: “The partnership with Computacenter enables us to align IT more closely to the business and delivers tangible results at lower and predictable costs.”

According to Computacenter managing director Simon Walsh, this is directly attributable to the SSF. “We are drawing on the expertise of our Shared Services Factory to provide Marks & Spencer with known service outcomes at a fixed price, which aids budgetary and quality control in the IT department.”

The success of the SSF is also demonstrated by the certification of the company’s Service Centre (in Milton Keynes) to ISO 20000  (see also page 6), which is the only worldwide standard specifically aimed at IT service management. It means that all customers using its services will benefit in terms of a consistent and cost-effective user experience. The BSI auditor responsible for the certification commented, “Through the Shared Services Factory the aim is to achieve standardisation to be best in class using the ITIL maturity model. Computacenter’s ‘Knowhow’ tool has been used to capture the ITIL disciplines in process form - a style that is truly 21st century.”

The SSF is designed to benefit organisations through reduced costs, improved quality, and by forming the basis for continual service improvement.

Cost reduction
Through the application of standardised and repeatable processes, Computacenter can design, implement and manage IT infrastructures at less cost, typically, than organisations can achieve in-house. Its approach is less reliant on individuals, focusing instead on extensive knowledge-sharing and on embedding ITIL-based practices that have proved successful with customers into the organisations’s operating model.

Key elements of the most successful interventions across more than 2,000 IT services contracts with 500 customers are captured and, once validated, become part of an agreed set of standards. These can then be applied across future engagements, and flexed according to the customer’s specific requirements.

To give just one example, Computacenter can cut maintenance costs dramatically through the use of its Technology Resources Group, the UK’s largest centralized engineering pool.  As Laurence Glover of Arcadia admits, “Computacenter has helped to reduce our desktop maintenance costs by more than 40 per cent over the last
four years.”

Improved quality and continual innovation
Because Computacenter systematically records details of what works best for its customers, it is able to continually review its approach and innovate in line with evolving best practice and customer need. 

It does this through the application of a set of standardized tools and processes. These include an integrated end to end toolset (SMTSv3) and reporting, together with the application of a Management Operating System (MOS) and Computacenter’s ‘Tempo’ methodology for the systemization of project delivery. In addition, Computacenter has a set of processes it calls ‘PASS12T’, which improves service quality and remove cost by shifting demand for incident management away from costly touch services through the use of prevention, automation and self-help technologies. This is delivered through its 24x7x365 centralised Services Centre, which handles more than two million calls per year.

In the service desk business, the sooner a problem is resolved, the lower the cost to the customer. Computacenter’s Simon Walsh says this approach has a direct benefit to the customer in terms of cost and user satisfaction. “The SSF means that, for customers using our Services Centre, we can resolve over 60 per cent of user incidents at first contact.”

The desire to innovate is embedded in the way Computacenter manages its business processes. If staff identify an improvement they are encouraged to record it via the company’s ‘KnowHow’ tool. The suggestion is then fed into TalkFreely, where these suggestions are tracked, assessed and, once validated, incorporated into the company’s core processes.

Such is the company’s confidence in its ability to deliver real quality of service improvements, and resulting savings, that it will commit to an agreed service improvement plan and is often prepared to build predicted savings into the price of the contract.

The SSF means that, for customers using our Services Centre, we can resolve over 60 per cent of user incidents at first contact

Mitigated risk
Because Computacenter uses only proven and ITIL-compliant processes, the company can remove much of the risk usually associated with transition to a new service provider. Any IT manager considering outsourcing will have had sleepless nights worrying about how to manage the tricky issue of transferring staff to the new employer.
Computacenter has significant experience in the field of TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings – Protection of Employement), with over 500 customer employees transferring to the company under TUPE since July 2005 and more than 1,700  in the past five years. Staff retention following these transfers is in the region of 5 per cent, well above the industry average.

This transfer process is managed using a communications methodology that ensures a consultative approach is taken with all employees. Providing a successful career path for talented staff transferred under this process is a key success criterion for Computacenter.

When in 2007, Reuters selected Computacenter as its new IT partner charged with increasing service levels and controlling costs to its customers it found that Computacenter significantly oiled the wheels of the transfer process.

Continual improvement
Computacenter takes a strongly collaborative approach with its customers, focusing on outcome-based service delivery. The foundation of Computacenter’s contract governance is a Customer Value Statement, agreed with its clients at Business Take-On. This is used to establish a common understanding of exactly what outcomes are required from the contract. It is then used as a communication tool, as well as for the qualification and prioritisation of any proposed changes.

Computacenter will then agree a Continual Improvement Plan with its customer. This takes into account the improvements Computacenter knows it can deliver as a result of its standardised tools and processes. An important aspect of this approach for David Conkleton, managing director of Parity Business Solutions, is that it also means
the service can flex quickly to his requirements, “Computacenter’s commitment to governance and value means that our contract is very flexible, and can be adapted to ensure that we remain responsive to changes in the market and the business.”

Critical to that ability to adapt to change is Computacenter’s national engineering pool, the Technical Resources Group, which allows the company to flex the resource allocation on the account to meet demand and ensures a consistent delivery, at the lowest cost price and with minimal user impact.

Key Performance Indicators in a Continual Improvement Plan will typically include improvements in Service Level Agreement attainment or specified cost reductions.

Computacenter’s approach to ‘industrialised’ IT services

Computacenter’s People

Glossary

SSF: Computacenter’s Shared Services Factory, a £30 million investment in processes, resources and tools that ‘industrialises’ service delivery, enabling the company to deliver services at lower cost and with consistent, more predictable outcomes.
Tempo: A consistent approach to projects used by Computacenter to deliver predictable outcomes for clients.
For use with customer employees transferring to Computacenter, this communications process ensures a fully consultative approach is taken with all employees.
MOS: Computacenter’s management operating system provides data on operational performance to help continually improve service.
PASS12T: Computacenter’s approach to service desk management, focusing on removing cost and improving service quality through prevention, automation and self-help technologies.
SMTSv3: Computacenter’s ITIL aligned service management tool suite, incorporating: