ITIL – Vireloup Pty Ltd

April 25, 2013April 16, 2016

Great customer service

A colleague recently told me of a poor experience she had with the IT department. She was involved in an international video conference and one of the remote sites could not connect. A call to the IT department went to voice mail. When IT was finally roused, they called the remote end, could not make contact so left a message and placed the incident on hold.

The impression this left was of an incompetent IT department, leading to the comment “… if they can’t even set up a video call, why would we trust them with any part of the business strategy?”

So how does an IT Department become excellent at customer service? It may surprise you, but I have a few simple steps (simple to say, difficult to do).

1. Process. The IT department needs good processes to ensure that calls are properly prioritised, escalated, resolved and reported upon. The ITIL incident, problem and change processes are essential. Add in knowledge, service level and configuration management and you’re cooking with gas.

2. People. Staff with a great customer service attitude put their heart and soul into effective communications and getting the customer back up and running. The challenge is to elucidate this talent within the constraints of agreed process. Sometimes front line staff have to go around processes or bend policies, but this must be the exception rather than the rule and non-compliance must be reviewed without blame. It may be an opportunity to improve the process or to re-enforce the reasons why things are done a certain way.

3. Technology. Good people and processes using a well adapted technology is a baseline for any organization to be successful. An IT service desk should have up to date tools – excel spreadsheets only work in small organizations and software as a service applications are available at a very competitive price.

4. Continuous improvement. Every poor interaction with a customer is an opportunity to improve customer service. Measure satisfaction with each interaction, identify underlying causes of dissatisfaction. These can be classified in an improvement register to tackle the high impact, low effort initiatives first. The video conferencing example from above should be solved with changes to process if it is a systemic or high impact event.

There are two qualifications to the above which need to be understood by decision makers. First, customer service improvements are neither free nor immediate. When you invest, the service delivery manager should be held accountable for real improvements in customer service. Second, if the systems that people use are not well adapted to their work, they will be dissatisfied no matter what the IT department does. Effective and timely investment in technology, done correctly, will immediately boost morale in the company.

So how happy are you with your technology?

April 4, 2013April 16, 2016

Will we all be playing games at work?

One of the most interesting pick from Gartner’s technology trends for 2013 was the imminent impact of gamification on the enterprise of tomorrow. The argument goes that 70% of Americans hate their job, but many go home at night to complete routine tasks in front of a computer screen by playing computer games (from Angry Birds to Resident Evil). Now if games developers have created scenarios where people want to achieve, why should we not do this in the workplace?

There are good examples of gamification being used for marketing, customer engagement and training. I have been wondering how the game strategy might be manifested in the dreary workplace of IT systems that I know and love. I decided to pick an area that I know– IT service desks – and imagine a gamed environment.

There need to be 3 components in a good game – an objective, a reward and a compelling environment.

1. The objective. Service desks should be measuring 3 key areas – staff productivity, service level breaches and customer satisfaction. The last of these is fairly difficult to manipulate (unless your father owns a chocolate factory).

For staff productivity, the obvious approach is to measure number of calls actioned. A more interesting strategy would be to measure how long it takes an analyst to fill in fields and move around the screen, very much like hand eye co-ordination games.

Service level breaches are often a result of poor interactions between first and second level teams. Providing visibility to expiring service levels and meaningful rewards could motivate the second level staff to pick up tickets and find speedy resolutions.

Customer satisfaction is the gold standard of measures (especially net promoter scores). The front line staff can have a major impact, but ultimately the result shows how well the whole IT team is working. The environment needs to make it easy for customers to give feedback.

2. Rewards. For sure there is merit in conventional rewards against objectives, but they have to be used carefully within the context of a game. True gamification requires that the rewards are integral to the game. For example a service desk analyst might get an “immediate escalation power” as a reward. This lets him or her prioritise a call in the queue and may improve their customer satisfaction score, leading to further reward.

Analysts at the second level, may accumulate a virtual currency (e.g. tchotchkes) every time a call is solved through a known problem that they resolved. This would encourage them to quickly analyse escalated tickets and create, then solve problems. The tchotchkes may be used to buy training on new technology, to develop system improvements or just to browse the internet. For many analysts visible mastery is reward enough, for others they can see work as an epic quest.

Games could have some level of randomization to add interest and fairness. The supervisor could create a shiniest shoe award one day or a best overheard service call reward.

3. The environment. Maybe the most challenging area for change is the visual and social environment. The screens for conventional service desk tools are a myriad of tabs and fields, a long way from the background in Call of Duty. Analysts could arrange their own screens, introduce background graphics and link their own visuals to objectives (e.g. a fire breathing dragon appears when service levels are breached).

Of more importance is the social environment. Staff must feel part of a great team, with a mixture of healthy competition and collaboration. A visible leader board can provide status to successful analysts. The game must provide opportunities for high score gamers to coach lower achievers and create team outcomes where everyone can win together.

Staff might get stressed about the scores that they do achieve, leading to higher absenteeism and higher turnover. It might be that having game objectives that are not explicitly linked to personal performance objectives is an advantage.

One of the exciting aspects of gamification is that it gives management a whole new set of levers to pull. With sufficient measurement and continuous improvement, managers should be able to adapt the games to deliver the organizational outcomes they wish to achieve, without the unintended consequences that are inevitable in any measurement regime.

How do you feel about going to work to play a game?

March 25, 2013April 16, 2016

Excuse me CEO, just one question please?

It's tough at the top — It’s tough at the top

Gartner runs a CEO survey every year and in his blog, Mark Raskino asked what questions we should be asking in these surveys. The focus is on how the CEO sees the current state of IT and how it needs to change to support the business.

In my time as CIO, I have often wanted to ask my CEO that killer question that reframes his view of IT. I am not sure that I ever quite succeeded, but the accelerating pace of change driven by technology is probably making some CEOs nervous. Time to hit them with the big one ….

But first I need to frame the state of play as I see it.

The executive and senior management in many organizations are disappointed with IT and do not trust the IT department to deliver the technology that they need for transformation. IT departments provide solutions too slowly; they are too expensive and overly restrictive. The existing solutions are often not fit for purpose. CEOs don’t want to restrict innovation and profit by forcing all technology solutions through IT, so they are allowing the business to buy their own cloud solutions.

The IT departments are frustrated by the way that the business engages with IT issues. Best practice approaches to architecture, IT governance or security are only paid lip service by business leaders. I hear comments like “the business really needs to improve its maturity to be successful with IT”. Furthermore IT budget are constantly under pressure and IT management is having to focus increased effort on supporting products that they had no part in procuring.

A classic Mexican standoff, with the majority of guns pointing at the unlucky CIO!

So how does the CEO think IT should be run in their organization?

Do you believe that following IT best practices would deliver the right IT solutions for your business?

The best practices are there to ensure agility, quality, alignment, risk management and costs control – exactly the problems that organizations are experiencing. IT best practices stretch well beyond the IT department and can only work when the CEO is committed to them. The nexus of the question is who the CEO trusts to fix IT.

If the CEO does not trust the CIO, do they trust ISACA, ITSMF, or PMI (the best practice organizations)? If they don’t trust these industry groups who do they trust? Please let me know your thoughts

March 20, 2013April 16, 2016

Just do these 5 things!

I am passionate about making organizations work better through technology. We could vastly improve business performance and prevent wanton destruction of wealth. With the resources freed up we can tackle poverty, the environment and global inequity – or am I getting carried away?

The agenda is clear and many would agree that the solutions are clear – but not simple. Every organization should be doing the following 5 things:

1. Corporate governance of IT. Technology is not a separate thing to the business, it needs to be managed by management and not by the IT department. There are best practices (Cobit5, ISO38500) but the real implementation challenge is that many senior managers do not have the skills and knowledge to make the right decisions about the technology in their business.

Implement a corporate governance of IT best practice and develop your senior staff to be excellent in its application

2. Enterprise architecture. This must not be confined to the IT department, it must become a central component of all business initiatives. Enterprise architecture is very difficult to do well despite the best practices (TOGAF, FEAF etc).

Invest in an enterprise architecture and use it broadly for business decision making

3. Continuous improvement. If you have ever taken delivery of a new enterprise IT system, it probably resembled a bath tub and not the speed boat that you expected. It takes time to update practices, fix bugs and improve processes. This should never stop, even when you realize that the system has grown into the beautiful sleek machine that you were expecting.

Formalize continuous improvement in all areas of the business, maybe through Six Sigma and an Improvement Register

4. Service management. It is now almost universally accepted that the only way to run IT in complex organizations is through a service management approach (ITIL, ISO20000 etc). In my view this approach should be extended to other internal service departments such as HR and finance.

Commit to a service management maturity level of 3 and above

5. Execution methods. Execution of technology projects is notoriously tricky, with 70% not delivering to expectations. Those that do deliver use proven methodologies run by high quality people. Project management, business process management, software development lifecycle, security, and information lifecycle are 5 key areas to look at.

Develop and nurture excellence in execution to deliver 90% on time, on budget initiatives

All organizations can benefit from the above approach, but the government sector is probably most in need. Citizens who see their hard earned tax payments go up in smoke through the likes of the Queensland Government Health Payroll debacle should be insisting on a plan from politicians. This was a $6M technology project that cost $1.2Bn (or $1000 from my family).

Commit to the above 5 steps and not only will IT disasters be less likely, we should also get IT enabled and connected governments. From this we can expect transparent government, a citizen centric approach, better social inclusion and at a reduced cost.

This would be a good start on the quest for a better world!

So how can we make this happen?