Execs Use Services Model to Reshape IT Units

Computerworld - CHICAGO -- Several years ago, the state of the help desk at GuideStone Financial Resources could be summed up by what end users called it: "the helpless desk." Not only was the moniker unflattering, it reflected lingering system problems that hurt the investment management firm's employee productivity.
With that in mind, the IT department at Dallas-based GuideStone, which is owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, turned to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library standard. One of the driving goals of ITIL is to reshape IT operations into a services model by spelling out service levels and detailed processes for delivering, managing and supporting technology.
Proponents say the standard can help cut IT costs and improve alignment with business units, which may explain the interest in it among IT managers at a conference held here last week by AFCOM, an Orange, Calif.-based professional association that focuses on data center issues.
Dawn Sawyer, operations manager at GuideStone, said that she began implementing ITIL processes four years ago and that the work is still in progress. As part of the ITIL process, tech-support workers assigned to the company's help desk were retrained or replaced with systems analysts and employees who could probe application problems.
Using workers with better skills increased GuideStone's payroll costs but led to a dramatic turnaround in responsiveness, Sawyer said. Most IT problems are now resolved within seven minutes, she noted. Before the adoption of ITIL, it sometimes took more than a day to fix problems.
Jim Marrs, data center manager at Austin Energy in Texas, said the utility started implementing ITIL this year. Marrs said he sees the standard as a framework for organizing internal processes, "so IT is more focused as a service."
For IT staffers, that means documenting their activities in more detail, as well as spelling out the steps and processes used to manage IT-related events and changes to systems, he added.
ITIL was developed in the 1980s by the U.K.'s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency and is now maintained by that country's Office of Government Commerce. The standard incorporates suggested best practices across a spectrum of IT processes and also details those processes while documenting how to manage them.
But getting IT workers to change their ways isn't always easy, said Slater M. Butts, director of network services at Safeway Inc. in Salt Lake City. When it comes to standards such as ITIL, many IT staffers really "don't like to adhere to them," he said. "They just like to carry the banner."
However, Butts sees value