It has developed historically that IT departments were separated from the activities of organizations and concentrated their businesses only on technologies. However, this has changed and IT as a purely technical department is already in the past. These days, businesses need their IT departments to be capable of perceiving the business needs quickly and implementing competitive ideas in a timely manner. However, it is still a big challenge for an IT department to reorient its activity to be both an IT service provider and an equal business partner.

Ms. Jo Johns, our guest from England, certified ITSM trainer, consultant and co-author of the SDI (Service Desk Institute) standard for best practice, shared with us her experience and personal observations. Currently Ms. Jo Johns works as Head of Training and Consultancy for the company Marval, a partner of Blue Bridge Ltd.

Let’s talk about the role of an IT department in Lithuania. There are still a lot of IT departments in our country that work in the traditional manner. Their business is mostly oriented to technologies. What benefits would they get if they became IT service providers – IT Service professionals?

The first thing they need to understand is that historically IT departments were separated from the rest of the organization. They were set in one place, made autonomous decisions and were strongly oriented into technologies. I mean the times when everybody was on mainframes and nobody had desktop computers. At those times IT departments were very remote from the activities of organizations.

Yet, the situation has changed now and such a technical IT is already in the past. This is not what the organizations for whom we work want from their IT provider. The IT departments have to see themselves as equal business partners and cannot just be technical service providers. First of all, they have to be the providers of a full service management solution, i.e. IT service departments. The main activities for specialists of such departments are the IT services. I emphasize this word “services”.

IT departments need to understand what their organizations are doing and where their organizations want to go in the future, so that they can plan their actions accordingly. The main IT objective is to support business units in achieving their goals. And then they could say: “We are helpful: we have introduced all these good things”. If the company’s own IT department does not ensure the benefit, there are a lot of outsourcers out there who are quite happy to stand up and say: “We can do all this and we will provide you with all the IT services that you require and the evidence to prove that we did what we said we would do”. Such service providers gladly propose us to try their services and be assured that they work well. It is a not unrealistic statement to say that the majority of the services provided by IT departments could be outsourced.

One of the main features demonstrating that an IT department is oriented to service delivery is that SLAs (Service Level Agreements) have been agreed with the top management of the organization. There are different opinions about this in Lithuania: the ones who do not see any need to restrict themselves with SLAs, while there are others who use them well. There are also situations when the IT departments have their SLAs prepared and work according to them, while the business units do not know anything about them. Are such SLAs also used in the United Kingdom where the ITIL principles have been applied for some time already?

You are talking about what I call “secret” SLAs. There are some organizations in the United Kingdom that still work in this way and I do not understand the point. An SLA enables you to identify the service you provide to the customer. The customer knows the services you provide and also what you are not able to offer. This means that expectations can be set and managed, and there are few unwelcome surprises or unreasonable demands. IT staff understand what is expected of them – and they have been consulted on what are fair and realistic target times.  You can show the customer what a good job you are doing – because you can show your service achievements on a monthly basis by means of a straightforward chart that is easy for customers to read.

I would not call a “secret” SLA a real SLA. An SLA is an agreement between two parties. The agreement brings the processes to the public eye, to the eye of customers, so they can see that the IT specialists understand their requirements, meet those requirements and do a very good job. SLAs are good for IT marketing purposes, as they advertise a good IT job as if stating on behalf of the IT team: “Look, we understand our customers’ requirements, we deliver what they have asked us to deliver and we deliver it in time and on target”. And with a good SLA structure, if we are unable to deliver in time and on target we should be able to see exactly why this was the case.

We have the same problem within the United Kingdom. There are more companies that do have SLAs than don’t but some people are scared to make them public. They have what I call secret SLAs – they have some form of service standard determined by IT but they don’t tell the! These are the ‘secret’ SLAs. However, our customers would rather know what we do. If they do not know what we do, they have their own expectations which are often very high and unrealistic. SLAs set reasonable expectations, which mean that the IT departments are aware of the scope of their own competence. And then they understand that if a certain activity is out of the scope, they are protected by an SLA and could say: “No, we do not provide that. What we provide is the services as these and those”. This makes the IT work much easier.

What would you suggest for the IT department which wants to move from “secret” to “public” SLAs?

The most important thing is to reach the required level of awareness and mutual commitment. I always say that the senior management is the best people to help you with this. They need to understand and articulate (talk about) the value that a proper SLA can bring to both the IT department and the entire organization.

Thus, my first advice would be to raise awareness on what an SLA is designed to do, how it helps the customer, the business and the IT staff. I recommend that you start at the top – with senior management. Then you need to cascade this perception to the IT personnel, so that they can understand what an SLA is really intended to do. This could take a lot of time, could take a lot of meetings, a lot of discussion.

The next thing I would do is ask the following questions of IT personnel: are the requested service levels realistic, can we bring the business people into the processes; can we talk to them to identify their requirements? If we have “secret” SLAs, we do not actually know whether we have satisfied the business needs, which is a serious mistake on our part. Why do I say this have a problem arising: the business units develop a negative opinion about the IT department. Business units do not receive the services they expect. And in turn, we do not know their expectations. Therefore, we ask our customers what are the service levels they would look for and how they would like us to provide those service levels, how would we get the feedback and what would be the targets.

Furthermore, I think we must pay big attention to the fears which are there if “open” and visible SLAs are used. Most human beings do not like to be seen failing, and many people within IT do not feel comfortable to show what they do, how they work. However, everything is different when there is an appropriate and fair SLA.

Certainly, we can fail sometimes, but all these failures must be assessed adequately. If something goes wrong, perhaps this shows that the agreement was not correctly understood, or maybe a technological failure was the reason for that. It is possible that our agreement is not implemented very well – but this offers us a service improvement opportunity! The positive side of an SLA is that it shows to the customers what we do and how we do it, what we have already agreed with them and what they should expect from us. This makes things fair and open.

I would also emphasize, to the IT staff in particular, the thing that I call “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me). Because, to get acceptance of anything, people have to understand in which way something is good for them, how it helps them. That is a really important message.

What are the main stages of the shift to an “open” SLA? First of all, identify the reason for using “secret” SLAs. We speak of a fear factor. Address the fears! Stress the benefits of SLAs and how they help the people within IT. It is evident that IT is hiding what they do in the situation where secret SLAs are used. Moreover, speak to the senior management of both sides, i.e. the IT and the business units; present them with the concept of SLAs and how they would help the organization to succeed. If both sides of say “it is good”, there is a strong likelihood that an SLA will be successful.

Other important things should be taken into account as well: proper maintenance, realistic needs, better understanding of what services we provide, what the customer needs are, and how we cope with the crisis situations. Our customers need to understand what we do, how we are going to find the way out of a situation. This way, they will be more satisfied with the results.

I have mentioned just a few examples here. If you convince people that they do need an SLA, you can then go through the SLA development process. You bring an SLA working group together using people from both business and IT and you start developing an SLA. Then you can start piloting the SLA with a friendly customer. After a pilot period of 3 or 4 months, check whether you need to do something to improve. Then agree for improvements and implement them in the organization.