www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/3583116
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Liberty Mutual Steps Up Performance With ITSM By Sharon Gaudin February 6, 2006 Two years ago, IT administrators at Liberty Mutual didn't know an application was down until users called to complain. Today, they're steps ahead, monitoring applications for slowdowns or abnormal activity -- sometimes fixing the problem before users even notice anything is wrong. It's all about being proactive instead of reactive, says Steven Wrenn, senior director of IT Service Management (ITSM) at Liberty Mutual. And he's able to be out in front of the problems because he's spent the last two years implementing ITSM at the $20 billion insurance company that has more than 40,000 employees -- 3,500 of them in IT alone. But getting to this point wasn't always an easy journey, he says. Before he could start to make IT run better, he had to gauge where they were. And that meant measuring IT's performance and showing those numbers to the business executives. Those metrics, Wrenn says, raised some eyebrows in the boardroom but airing them also didn't make him very popular in the IT department. ''You're showing your dirty laundry,'' says Wrenn. ''You've got to be prepared for that. You have to say, 'This is what it is and we're working on making it better.' At the beginning, I put the metrics together and people said, 'You can't make that public.' There was a large fear factor. But we had a new CIO and he drove home that he wasn't about tracking people down. He was about wanting to get better. But it was a little scary. I took a lot of arrows. I was the constant deliverer of bad news. ''In the beginning, I took it from IT people because we were showing that we weren't as good as we thought we were,'' adds Wrenn. ''Without data, everyone thought we were doing a good job. Everyone was working really hard but the job they were dong wasn't at the level of service we needed to deliver to our clients. Once we got really going, it was quick to fix. People want to do better. When I told them what the score was in the beginning, they said, 'Maybe we don't want to know.' but I said 'It's too late.'. I opened that can of worms and you can't put the worms back in. I used to go home and say 'I'm going to develop a drinking habit.'. Today, the going is easier for Wrenn, who was hired at Liberty Mutual three years ago to get IT on board with a service management mindset. He says he spent a year reviewing operations and identifying opportunities to get IT workers thinking about the business and the customer, and not just about the technology. With a dozen major offices, several hundred satellite offices and more than a few thousand servers at the insurance giant, Wrenn was looking at a massive job. Working for the Customer IT Service Management is both a mindset and a set of practices that make processes reliable, dependable and traceable. It's all about changing the way IT professionals have, in general, looked at their job. It's no longer just about making sure the digital trains run on time. It's about making sure the business has the tools it needs to be successful. It's a major change in thinking and actions. Today's IT professionals need to feel like they are part of the business team -- with everyone working for the customer. ''This is all market driven,'' says Wrenn. ''If we want to be in the top five insurance companies, you've got to be data driven. It was all about competition and scalability. We're growing. When you're adding on 5 percent to a $20 billion company, that's a big jump. You've got to be prepared for that kind of growth. You've got to be prepared for the future.'' The first hurdle that Wrenn faced was the lack of metrics. Liberty Mutual's IT department had no way of knowing how effective they were because they didn't measure application uptime, slowdowns or even the severity of problems on the network. ''The environment was ready for change in a lot of ways,'' says Wrenn. ''The only thing that was really haunting us was that there were no metrics. Without metrics, you really don't know what to fix first... We had a bunch of firemen but we really needed fire prevention.'' Wrenn says it took six or seven months before the metrics started to have any real meaning. It took about three months of collecting information to show some change. After a while, people saw that Wrenn and his team were focusing on the right things. ''The first thing is to show that you can control [the metrics],'' he says. ''Then you try to control what is driving the numbers.'' Two years into the ITSM implementation, Wrenn says they are monitoring 20 percent to 25 percent of their applications, focusing on those that have the biggest effect on customers, such as claims applications and customer service. ''If it has an immediate impact to your operating model, you should be watching it on an ongoing basis,'' he notes. ''But if I have an expense report module, and it goes down for a day, do I really care? Does it impact our ability to generate revenue? If you want to monitor everything, you have to be ready to pay for that monitoring. You can't afford to monitor everything.'' And that monitoring has paid off. Wrenn says monitoring has given him a bigger picture view of his network -- what applications feed others and what applications directly link with users. For instance, users at one of Liberty Mutual's service offices started work at 6 a.m. every morning and immediately began taking claims. The applications they used obviously needed to be up and running at that time. The problem lay in the fact that IT workers didn't know that another application fed that main application, so sometimes they would take it down to work on it, not realizing that it was affecting the claims people -- and their ability to get work done. ''We didn't have the visibility of how all this interplayed,'' he adds. ''All these things had to come together... When you don't have something available, you're affecting the ability of a customer to file a claim. You're not only affecting our ability to pay a claim, but you're affecting customer satisfaction because it slows the process down and then it forces rework because the process isn't efficient.'' Changing a Mindset One of the challenges that Wrenn has faced is getting IT people to look at the business side of the picture -- to see beyond the individual applications and to see the need for customer claims to go through. Part of his job has been to change a long-held way of thinking about their job. They don't have to understand exactly how the claims department works, but they do need to understand how their work affects that department. ''Not everyone is gong to understand how what they're doing affects the business,'' he says. ''How do you expect a Unix engineer to understand an actuary? We do IT to enable a business to make money. That's what you hope they understand. The IT managers need to drive that through and the frontline people have to get the real business idea. The manager has to get that piece. Everyone needs to understand if there's a problem, you've got to fix it fast to get the business running again.'' It's not always an easy adjustment. ''You still get some people who wish this would all go away and they could go back to being the high-tech gurus,'' he adds. ''The purpose of IT is the business purpose and that's here to stay. It's all about making money and winning new customers.'' Part of any IT resistance was some hesitation about signing Service Level Agreements, which are contracts between IT and various business departments. It's a critical part of ITSM. Business executives and IT administrators sit down and work out the agreement -- this is what business can depend on receiving from IT, whether it's availability, response time to a problem, or speed of service. Once the IT manager puts his or her name on the dotted line, it's a solid commitment that they will deliver a certain level of service. ''That was a struggle. You sign it and then you're held accountable,'' says Wrenn, who adds that if IT meets certain levels of reliability, then there are bonuses in play. ''People said, 'I'm not signing this. I can't prove this.' Finally, they got on board. How do you know what to build if you don't know the level of performance it needs to have? This is the level of performance we need to be successful. Without having a long track record of measuring this stuff, they were reluctant to agree to certain service levels... Everybody started to play nice after a while.'' Making this kind of cultural change is an ongoing process. It requires constant reinforcement. ''It's relentless,'' Wrenn notes. ''An IT environment used to be an engineering environment... They don't [automatically] see it as customer service. It's very hard to change people's minds by changing their minds. You put targets up. You let people know about performance levels. Keep those metrics in front of them. People change when you continually focus on different things. They start to move in that direction. ''The metrics are the most critical part of any change,'' he adds. ''If you need a different performance, then start to measure what you're trying to drive to. Every time I hear a customer saying 'This is faster.' or 'This is up more,', it proves that we're moving in the right direction.'' |
