High Performing It Support Organisation

White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

The High Performing IT Support Organisation Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan April 2009

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

Index

1. 2. 3.

Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3 IT support organisations in practice ................................................................... 4 Transformation to High Performing Production services .................................. 5 3.1. Change Management ................................................................................. 6 3.2. Monitoring and Metrics ............................................................................. 7 3.3. Incident Management................................................................................. 7 3.4. IT Risk Management.................................................................................. 7 4. Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 8

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

1.

Introduction

Are great performing IT support services achieved through luck or by chance? The answer is a resounding NO. High performing IT support organizations have identified the processes and controls that really help them to achieve their operational effectiveness and efficiency objectives. A high performing IT support organisation helps the business achieve its goals and optimise time, money and resource. For example, , providing high availability of trading systems enables traders to trade efficiently; providing timely risk numbers enables decision makers to take right decisions; providing high availability of settlement systems enables timely and accurate settlements; uninterrupted customer transaction by consumer banks enables happy and loyal customers and many more. IT and business leaders today can no longer look at IT simply as a cost centre. IT is now a vital part of business success. Improving the efficiency of IT and the measurement of its impact on business performance are key to the creation and maintenance of a high performance IT structure. According to a recent study*, High Performing IT support organisations deliver significantly higher returns than their industry counterparts as reflected by delivering ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾

8x more projects 5x more applications and software 5x more IT services 7x more business IT changes overall better security measures spanning loss, detection, correction and prevention

The key objective of this white paper is to highlight the key issues and discuss processes and controls required to build a high performing IT support organisation.

* Reference: White Paper published by TripWire Inc. on Keeping Up Your SOX Compliance And Turning IT into a High Performer by Improving Change Control in www.findwhitepapers.com. Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

2.

IT support organisations in practice

E f f i c i e n c y

B

D

A

C

Cost Figure 1

A typical IT support organisation would fall into one of the four quadrants above. Table 1 shows the characteristics of organisations that fall in each of the quadrants. Quadrants A B C D

Cost Low Low High High

Efficiency Low High Low High

IT Dependency Low Low / High High High

Tolerance level High High / Low Low Low

Table 1

Organisations that fall into quadrant A spend less money on IT production services than those in C and D, and subsequently their efficiency is low. Organisations that fall into quadrant A must necessarily have a high tolerance for outages in an environment where disruption due to non availability of systems does not directly translate to monitory losses. Interest in improving efficiency within such organisations is of a low priority and hence this article does not address those organisations Organisations that fall into quadrant B spend less money on IT production support than those in quadrant C and D, yet achieve very high efficiency. Quadrant B is an aspirational ideal; the assumption is that these organisations are very mature and hence this article does not address those organisations. Organisations that fall into quadrants C and D represent the majority of investment banks. Quadrant C organisations spend large amounts of money on IT support services, but do not Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation have a level of efficiency that reflects the money spent. Organisations that fall into quadrant D spend large amounts of money to achieve the stability they have but this is potentially more than is required. A stable production environment can directly translate to increased revenue. For example, risk managers and traders will be able to manage risks and trade efficiently if they have uninterrupted systems running during trading hours in turn providing the potential to generate revenue. Even in the current economic climate, a majority of organisations spend a significant amount of money on IT support to gain stability. Addressing the processes and controls surrounding IT support serves the purpose of both saving money on IT support and creating a more stable environment reducing the risk of system outages. The following section discusses four transformation initiatives that would help organisations in quadrants C and D to gain optimum return on their IT spend.

3.

Transformation to High Performing Production services

There are four key underlying issues that cause IT production services to under perform: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Failure to monitor systems for unauthorized changes Failure in monitoring systems Failure in identifying problem areas and root cause Failure to identify and manage IT Risk

Our objective is to understand these underlying issues and identify steps to increase efficiency and/or decrease cost through development of a high performing IT support organisation. Position E shows where there is a clear reduction in cost and increase in efficiency from positions C and D. In short, our objective is to move to a position closer to the quadrant B.

E E f f i c i e n c y

B

D

C

A

Cost Figure 2

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation The following four controls underpin the movement of C and D organisations to position E. 1. 2. 3. 4.

3.1.

Define a clear change management strategy and strict adherence procedures Define a clear monitoring policy, constantly producing and reviewing matrices Define a clear Incident management procedure and strict adherence procedures Define a clear IT security policy and strict adherence procedures.

Change Management

With the several years of experience I have within investment banking environment, managing complex production environments, at least 60% of all outages in production systems are due to a change. A key aspect of stability can be achieved by having a controlled change process within the production environment. High performing IT support organisations constantly review their change management strategy to increase efficiency. This is also one of the key best practices defined in ITIL V3. Key aspects of change control are: ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾

Investment to enhance testing infrastructure Enhanced testing strategy Long term release schedule with a lesser number of releases Setting-up of a CAB (Change Advisory Board) holding full authority on releases Zero down on unauthorised and emergency changes Segregation of duties

High performing IT support organisations make substantial investment to match the test environments to a similar specification and capacity as that of production environment. This will ensure sufficient regression testing and performance testing can be done on the volume of data that the application can expect in the production environment. Every change that is scheduled to be moved to production should have necessarily crossed several stages of testing including System Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Regression Testing and Performance Testing on an environment that matches the production environment, using a frozen code base. Test cases for all the testing should include all the aspects of the application functionality. IT and the Business should work together closely and agree upon a book of work and a release schedule that would run for one year with minimal changes to the plan. This will also ensure a robust release plan. . High performing IT support organisations have a Change Advisory Board. The CAB is chaired by an independent body that has the capability to analyse changes and the authority to stop changes (if required). All the changes are moved to the production environment only after receiving full sign-off by the chair of the CAB. There are no shortcuts to move a change to production. Finally, segregation of duties and accountability hold the key role for the success of the process. A controlled change process increases stability, hence the IT support resource can be invested in more productive activities than fix on fail. Eventually, a substantial reduction in cost can be achieved for organisations in quadrants C and D.

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

3.2.

Monitoring and Metrics

A high performing IT support team invests in tools for monitoring system performance. Ideally, organisations have a dedicated team for monitoring. Monitoring needs to be performed on a number of levels including; • • • • • • • • •

hardware performance, database performance, network, capacity, volume of data, application performance, number of users, usage, number of incidents etc.

Appropriate metrics are published, trends identified, and actions taken after thorough study and investigation. This approach to monitoring the systems is a proactive approach and will avert several outages by detecting critical problems before they occur. Investing in the right monitoring tools will result in increased business confidence and increase stability.

3.3.

Incident Management

High performing IT support organisations have a structured Incident Management process. They have a workflow system for ticket management that is set-up in line with ITIL best practices. They also have a defined process to identify the root cause for Incidents / Outages using tools such as Fish Bone diagrams. An independent problem manager closely tracks the list of tasks resulting from the root cause analysis until all the actions are fully closed. The problem management team of the high performing IT support organisations use the ticket management system efficiently to identify repetitive issues and treat them the same way they would treat Incidents. Mundane repetitive issues are those which are easy to fix, but consume resources. Failure to fix them may be critical. High performing IT support organisations also use the ticket management system as inputs for knowledge base. Managing incidents in line with the ITIL best practices, prove beneficial by reducing number of outages, which eventually results in substantial savings in cost. Resources that otherwise work on outages can be redeployed to other tasks. This also increases resource retention.

3.4.

IT Risk Management

The high performing IT support organisation would focuses its’ energy on managing IT Risk. Like all other risks, IT Risk Management is the process of identifying, measuring and controlling events. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried-out on the likelihood of an event happening and the financial impact that it is likely to have. Safeguards and countermeasures are taken to prevent the risks from happening. The high performing IT support organisation spends its energy in mitigating actions and preventing the risk from happening rather than addressing the fallout of unmanaged risk. Not managing IT Risk will have direct cost impact and can also have regulatory implications. . Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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White Paper High Performing IT Support Organisation

4.

Conclusion

All the points discussed in this paper reflect the application of common sense and are in line with ITIL V3 best practices. However, resistance to change, lack of time, lack of initiative, fear of additional cost / investment, lack of expertise and fear of failure, among others supply some of the reasons why the majority of IT support organisations fail to implement them. This results in the underperformance of the IT support organisation resulting in an increase in IT support cost and lack of efficiency. High performing IT support organisations are proactive and spend money to mitigate risks rather than addressing the fallout of unmanaged risk. This approach is proven to be more cost effective than fixing the problem after it happens.

About the author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan (Subbu) is a highly qualified (M.Sc., MBA, MAF, PRINCE 2 Practitioner and ITIL certified) IT Production manager. With over 14 years of multi-national experience (predominantly in Investment Banking environment), the author has transformed underperforming IT support organisations to high performing ones. Please call +44 7837 466338 or e-mail [email protected] to discuss further to transform your IT support organisation to a high performing one.

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan Contact: 07837 466338

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