Accenture ITS Recommendations

Accenture was engaged to conduct a comprehensive assessment of IT at Michigan and provide recommendations at both the unit and campus level. As part of its work, over the 2010 summer, Accenture also prepared a comprehensive ITS capability assessment and a separate set of recommendations directed at improving ITS' ability to become the shared service provider of choice for campus.

Accenture identified three key opportunity areas, each with recommendations to improve the sustainability, cost effectiveness, and alignment of ITS services:

Improve ability to align with business customers
Improve cost efficiency and transparency
Drive consistent, dependable service quality

As is the case with campus recommendations, the ITS recommendations require additional analysis that goes beyond the Accenture assessment. The ITS Lead Team is continually reviewing and prioritizing the recommendations contained in the Accenture report. Some recommendations may be adopted as is, others may be modified based on in-depth analysis, and still others may not be adopted at all.

The recommendations below include a brief statement of the problem identified by Accenture, the Accenture recommendation, and the primary objective to be achieved by carrying out the recommendation.

ITS has already initiated ongoing projects connected to specific recommendations; in some instances, this work had begun prior to the release of the Accenture report. A brief description of ITS initiatives currently underway along with the project lead follows the appropriate specific recommendation.

OPPORTUNITY AREA A: Improve Ability to Align with Business Customers—Offer the right services, at the right price and the right quality

1. Organize to Build and Manage Customer Relationships

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not currently manage customer interactions with a set of consistent methods and processes. ITS should develop a customer engagement framework and standardized processes for working with customers.

Primary Outcome:

Building and enhancing campus relationships will increase customer awareness of ITS products and services, build trust, and strengthen customer engagement.

Current ITS Initiative: Account Management
Goal: Define the customer relationship management strategy and plan for ITS, including strengthened engagement with stakeholders and IT governance to better understand service needs. Coordinate with ITS service management to ensure significant alignment of service strategy and delivery with customer needs.
ITS Lead: Tim Kelly, Program Office

2. Establish Better Defined Priority Setting and IT Investment Processes

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not currently employ consistent methods and processes for capturing campus demand or for setting priorities based on cost-benefit analyses. ITS should require that all projects start with a business case that connects to agreed-upon standard IT investment criteria.

Primary Outcome:

Setting ITS priorities and developing processes that are closely aligned with customer needs and their priorities, and approved by IT governance, will improve service alignment and better ensure that IT resources are effectively allocated.

Current ITS Initiative: Enterprise Portfolio Management
Goal: Create project selection, prioritization, and evaluation processes in order to deliver consistent results through a repeatable project approval process that enables effective decision-making and internal resource utilization.
ITS Lead: Cathy Curley, Process and Service Management

3. Establish a Customer Focused Service Strategy and Service Offering

Problem and Recommendations:

ITS lacks an overall service strategy that aligns with the university's core missions or that effectively solicits and incorporates campus stakeholder demand. ITS needs to develop and publish a comprehensive catalog of services as well as improve its ability to communicate its products and services to campus.

Primary Objective:

Developing a comprehensive strategy to better meet stakeholder priorities will help ITS provide products and services that align with the university's missions of teaching, learning and research.

OPPORTUNITY AREA B: Improve Cost Efficiency and Transparency—Develop simple, efficient and transparent ways to manage cost

4. Establish Shared Service Financial Management Processes

Problem and Recommendation:

The IT community (campus and ITS) does not currently have accounting methods in place to understand the full cost of an IT product or service. ITS should improve and consistently utilize planning, costing, budgeting, and forecasting tools.

Primary Objective:

Establishing cost management processes will allow ITS to effectively understand total costs of products and services as a means to better manage the cost of service and improve campus IT efficiency.

5. Improve Resource and Capacity Planning

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS is not adequately capturing staff time spent on any particular product or service. ITS should extend existing tools to capture staff time spent on services and develop better systems to align resources to future customer needs.

Primary Objective:

Developing comprehensive resource planning and forecasting processes will better align customer demand and ITS capacity to reduce investment risk.

Current ITS Initiative: Effort Reporting and Capacity Management
Goal: Expand effort tracking, resource capacity planning, and project scheduling capabilities to all of ITS to improve ability to measure costs to develop and run services.
ITS Lead: Cathy Curley, Process and Service Management

6. Establish Cost and Quality Metrics for Shared Services

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not consistently leverage metrics to understand total service costs and performance quality. ITS should develop and implement cost and quality metrics that align to customer needs.

Primary Objective:

Becoming a transparent service provider whose service costs and performance quality are visible and communicated regularly with customers requires a metrics framework and reporting approach to provide customers with a transparent and consistent view into the value of each service.

OPPORTUNITY AREA C: Drive consistent, dependable service quality—Focus on making services efficient, scalable and manageable

7. Enhance Service Management Function

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not adhere to consistent service management processes with associated accountability across the entire organization. ITS should define and implement standard planning, development, and operational processes across all products and services and continuously measure customer satisfaction with service delivery.

Primary Objective:

Establishing better-defined internal accountability for the management of products and services will improve overall service quality and customer satisfaction.

Current ITS Initiative: Establish service management function
Goal: Define ITS services at a level that will support tool configuration and ITIL process implementation.
ITS Lead: Andrea Stevens, Process and Service Management

8. Enhance Operations and Availability Management

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not have a single operations architecture to assure consistent customer experience across all services, resulting in products and services that do not consistently perform as expected by customers. ITS should create and implement an operations architecture that can be leveraged by all shared service providers, helps redefine the organization and break down silos, and increases productive sharing of technologies and business processes.

Primary Objective:

Creating a framework and implementing tools and processes to deliver products and services to customers at agreed-upon levels will improve the consistency and dependability of ITS services, allowing it to better meet and manage customer expectations and satisfaction.

Current ITS Initiative: Enhance operations and availability management
Goal: Establish the foundation to support process implementation across ITS and implement Incident, Problem, Change, and Knowledge management in Infrastructure Services and the consolidated Service Desk.
ITS Lead: Andrea Stevens, Process and Service Management

9. Manage Introduction of New Shared Services

Problem and Recommendation:

ITS does not have adequate internal systems in place to satisfactorily plan, design, and build new products and services without customers experiencing scheduling delays or misaligned expectations. ITS should establish organization-wide standards and processes for customer aligned product lifecycle management including the planning, development, and deployment of new services, upgrades, and releases.

Primary Objective:

Establishing rigorous and detailed processes directed at how new products and services are deployed will improve lifecycle management and customer satisfaction.

Current ITS Initiative: Develop Service Lifecycle Framework
Goal: Develop a lifecycle framework to better manage new or changed shared services from concept to end-of-life. The service lifecycle framework will improve consistency and standardize delivery process for service development and implementation.
ITS Lead: Andrea Stevens, Process and Service Management

10. Establish Unified Service Desk

Problem and Recommendation:

Multiple service desks confuse customers, are costly, inefficient, and difficult to coordinate. ITS should consolidate all internal service desks to provide a single point of contact for customers supported by a fully integrated and unified request and support structure.

Primary Objective:

Establishing a unified ITS service desk allows customers to contact a single entity to request any service or report any problem.

Current ITS Initiative: Establish unified service desk by consolidating existing front line customer support
Goal: Implement a single point of contact to support all ITS products and services and to better align with current technology, reduce total cost of operation, and leverage new tools, technologies, and procedures.
ITS Lead: Beth Farrell, Process and Service Management