White Paper

High Performing IT Support Organisation

The High Performing IT Support Organisation

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan
April 2009

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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White Paper
High Performing IT Support Organisation

Index

1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3
2. IT support organisations in practice ................................................................... 4
3. Transformation to High Performing Production services .................................. 5
3.1. Change Management ................................................................................. 6
3.2. Monitoring and Metrics ............................................................................. 7
3.3. Incident Management................................................................................. 7
3.4. IT Risk Management.................................................................................. 7
4. Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 8

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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White Paper
High Performing IT Support Organisation

1. Introduction

Are great performing IT support services achieved through luck or by chance? The answer is
a resounding NO. High performing IT support organizations have identified the processes
and controls that really help them to achieve their operational effectiveness and efficiency
objectives. A high performing IT support organisation helps the business achieve its goals and
optimise time, money and resource. For example, , providing high availability of trading
systems enables traders to trade efficiently; providing timely risk numbers enables decision
makers to take right decisions; providing high availability of settlement systems enables
timely and accurate settlements; uninterrupted customer transaction by consumer banks
enables happy and loyal customers and many more.

IT and business leaders today can no longer look at IT simply as a cost centre. IT is now a
vital part of business success. Improving the efficiency of IT and the measurement of its
impact on business performance are key to the creation and maintenance of a high
performance IT structure.

According to a recent study*, High Performing IT support organisations deliver significantly

higher returns than their industry counterparts as reflected by delivering

¾ 8x more projects
¾ 5x more applications and software
¾ 5x more IT services
¾ 7x more business IT changes
¾ overall better security measures spanning loss, detection, correction and prevention

The key objective of this white paper is to highlight the key issues and discuss processes and
controls required to build a high performing IT support organisation.

* Reference: White Paper published by TripWire Inc. on Keeping Up Your SOX Compliance
And Turning IT into a High Performer by Improving Change Control in
www.findwhitepapers.com.

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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2. IT support organisations in practice

E B D
f
f
i
c
i
e
n
c A
y C

Cost

Figure 1

A typical IT support organisation would fall into one of the four quadrants above. Table 1
shows the characteristics of organisations that fall in each of the quadrants.

Quadrants Cost Efficiency IT Dependency Tolerance level

A Low Low Low High
B Low High Low / High High / Low
C High Low High Low
D High High High Low
Table 1

Organisations that fall into quadrant A spend less money on IT production services than those
in C and D, and subsequently their efficiency is low. Organisations that fall into quadrant A
must necessarily have a high tolerance for outages in an environment where disruption due to
non availability of systems does not directly translate to monitory losses. Interest in
improving efficiency within such organisations is of a low priority and hence this article does
not address those organisations

Organisations that fall into quadrant B spend less money on IT production support than those
in quadrant C and D, yet achieve very high efficiency. Quadrant B is an aspirational ideal;
the assumption is that these organisations are very mature and hence this article does not
address those organisations.

Organisations that fall into quadrants C and D represent the majority of investment banks.
Quadrant C organisations spend large amounts of money on IT support services, but do not

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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High Performing IT Support Organisation
have a level of efficiency that reflects the money spent. Organisations that fall into quadrant
D spend large amounts of money to achieve the stability they have but this is potentially more
than is required.

A stable production environment can directly translate to increased revenue. For example,
risk managers and traders will be able to manage risks and trade efficiently if they have un-
interrupted systems running during trading hours in turn providing the potential to generate
revenue. Even in the current economic climate, a majority of organisations spend a significant
amount of money on IT support to gain stability. Addressing the processes and controls
surrounding IT support serves the purpose of both saving money on IT support and creating a
more stable environment reducing the risk of system outages.

The following section discusses four transformation initiatives that would help organisations
in quadrants C and D to gain optimum return on their IT spend.

3. Transformation to High Performing Production services

There are four key underlying issues that cause IT production services to under perform:

1. Failure to monitor systems for unauthorized changes

2. Failure in monitoring systems
3. Failure in identifying problem areas and root cause
4. Failure to identify and manage IT Risk

Our objective is to understand these underlying issues and identify steps to increase efficiency
and/or decrease cost through development of a high performing IT support organisation.
Position E shows where there is a clear reduction in cost and increase in efficiency from
positions C and D. In short, our objective is to move to a position closer to the quadrant B.

E
E B D
f
f
i
c
i
e
n
c A C
y

Cost

Figure 2

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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High Performing IT Support Organisation
The following four controls underpin the movement of C and D organisations to position E.

1. Define a clear change management strategy and strict adherence procedures

2. Define a clear monitoring policy, constantly producing and reviewing matrices
3. Define a clear Incident management procedure and strict adherence procedures
4. Define a clear IT security policy and strict adherence procedures.

3.1. Change Management

With the several years of experience I have within investment banking environment,
managing complex production environments, at least 60% of all outages in production
systems are due to a change. A key aspect of stability can be achieved by having a controlled
change process within the production environment. High performing IT support
organisations constantly review their change management strategy to increase efficiency.
This is also one of the key best practices defined in ITIL V3. Key aspects of change control
are:

¾ Investment to enhance testing infrastructure

¾ Enhanced testing strategy
¾ Long term release schedule with a lesser number of releases
¾ Setting-up of a CAB (Change Advisory Board) holding full authority on releases
¾ Zero down on unauthorised and emergency changes
¾ Segregation of duties

High performing IT support organisations make substantial investment to match the test
environments to a similar specification and capacity as that of production environment. This
will ensure sufficient regression testing and performance testing can be done on the volume of
data that the application can expect in the production environment. Every change that is
scheduled to be moved to production should have necessarily crossed several stages of testing
including System Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Regression Testing and
Performance Testing on an environment that matches the production environment, using a
frozen code base. Test cases for all the testing should include all the aspects of the application
functionality. IT and the Business should work together closely and agree upon a book of
work and a release schedule that would run for one year with minimal changes to the plan.
This will also ensure a robust release plan. .

High performing IT support organisations have a Change Advisory Board. The CAB is
chaired by an independent body that has the capability to analyse changes and the authority to
stop changes (if required). All the changes are moved to the production environment only
after receiving full sign-off by the chair of the CAB. There are no shortcuts to move a change
to production. Finally, segregation of duties and accountability hold the key role for the
success of the process.

A controlled change process increases stability, hence the IT support resource can be invested
in more productive activities than fix on fail. Eventually, a substantial reduction in cost can be
achieved for organisations in quadrants C and D.

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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High Performing IT Support Organisation

3.2. Monitoring and Metrics

A high performing IT support team invests in tools for monitoring system performance.
Ideally, organisations have a dedicated team for monitoring. Monitoring needs to be
performed on a number of levels including;

• hardware performance,
• database performance,
• network,
• capacity,
• volume of data,
• application performance,
• number of users,
• usage,
• number of incidents etc.

Appropriate metrics are published, trends identified, and actions taken after thorough study
and investigation.

This approach to monitoring the systems is a proactive approach and will avert several
outages by detecting critical problems before they occur. Investing in the right monitoring
tools will result in increased business confidence and increase stability.

3.3. Incident Management

High performing IT support organisations have a structured Incident Management process.

They have a workflow system for ticket management that is set-up in line with ITIL best
practices. They also have a defined process to identify the root cause for Incidents / Outages
using tools such as Fish Bone diagrams. An independent problem manager closely tracks the
list of tasks resulting from the root cause analysis until all the actions are fully closed. The
problem management team of the high performing IT support organisations use the ticket
management system efficiently to identify repetitive issues and treat them the same way they
would treat Incidents. Mundane repetitive issues are those which are easy to fix, but consume
resources. Failure to fix them may be critical. High performing IT support organisations also
use the ticket management system as inputs for knowledge base.

Managing incidents in line with the ITIL best practices, prove beneficial by reducing number
of outages, which eventually results in substantial savings in cost. Resources that otherwise
work on outages can be redeployed to other tasks. This also increases resource retention.

3.4. IT Risk Management

The high performing IT support organisation would focuses its’ energy on managing IT Risk.
Like all other risks, IT Risk Management is the process of identifying, measuring and
controlling events. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried-out on the likelihood
of an event happening and the financial impact that it is likely to have. Safeguards and
countermeasures are taken to prevent the risks from happening. The high performing IT
support organisation spends its energy in mitigating actions and preventing the risk from
happening rather than addressing the fallout of unmanaged risk. Not managing IT Risk will
have direct cost impact and can also have regulatory implications. .
Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com
Contact: 07837 466338
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High Performing IT Support Organisation

4. Conclusion

All the points discussed in this paper reflect the application of common sense and are in line
with ITIL V3 best practices. However, resistance to change, lack of time, lack of initiative,
fear of additional cost / investment, lack of expertise and fear of failure, among others supply
some of the reasons why the majority of IT support organisations fail to implement them.
This results in the underperformance of the IT support organisation resulting in an increase in
IT support cost and lack of efficiency. High performing IT support organisations are proactive
and spend money to mitigate risks rather than addressing the fallout of unmanaged risk. This
approach is proven to be more cost effective than fixing the problem after it happens.

About the author:

Subramanian Gopalakrishnan (Subbu) is a highly qualified (M.Sc., MBA, MAF, PRINCE 2

Practitioner and ITIL certified) IT Production manager. With over 14 years of multi-national
experience (predominantly in Investment Banking environment), the author has transformed under-
performing IT support organisations to high performing ones. Please call +44 7837 466338 or e-mail
subrago@gmail.com to discuss further to transform your IT support organisation to a high performing
one.

Author: Subramanian Gopalakrishnan e-mail: subrago@gmail.com

Contact: 07837 466338
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