Establishing a Customer-Focused IT Service Model

Opportunity

Several years back, the utility initiated an IT Service Management (ITSM) using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework with the goal of improving the delivery of IT services. While change, incident, and problem management capabilities were established in some areas, it was inconsistently applied across the organization and further improvements had stalled. As a result, IT had not fully established a service model with its business partners. Some IT—Business relationships had become strained.

Solution

Pepper Foster worked to complete the IT Service Catalog to centralize, organize, and manage the business of IT services. A framework was established to form Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) with key business groups. It facilitated process standardization, continuous process improvement, and development of service capacity plans for use in service demand forecasting and trending analysis. The service catalog subsequently drove self-service portal development to request IT services.

Outcome

By establishing a customer-focused model for IT, services are defined, prioritized, and marketed to its internal customers and end-users to more clearly communicate the value of IT, what it delivers, and how well it performs against expectations. By creating a single point of contact for IT requests and providing a service-centric view to its business customers, the project led to a better understanding of business needs: it spawned additional initiatives to improve the IT—Business relationship.