To achieve joined-up IT, Unilever decided on the
challenging solution of implementing ITIL across the global
business. Helen Beckett discovers the secrets of
Unilever’s successful integration.
ITIL has come of age and is making the leap from being a clutch
of worthy standards to a practical tool for delivering IT
efficiently. While ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library, its
reach is more profound than its name suggests, and enthusiasts say
it changes organisations too.
Consumer goods company Unilever is busy finalising its worldwide
implementation of ITIL to enable a move from federated to
centralised IT. Earlier this year the Anglo Dutch firm reported a
6% increase in net profits for its first quarter, despite having
made shock profit warnings in 2004.
The turnaround follows a switch in strategy from autonomous
businesses selling their own products, to regional business units
doing a portfolio sell. “The only way to achieve one view of the
new mega business was to have one view of the supporting IT
infrastructure,” says Geoff Thirlwall, vice-president of IT
services at Unilever Europe.
ITIL, a toolkit of processes defined for IT service management
and delivery, was adopted as it enabled a joined-up approach
instead of servicing IT from silos.
The extent of the challenge of integrating IT was not
underestimated, however. “Unilever is comprised of a group of
brands and previously inclined to the federated model, where
individual companies were supported by their own IT,” says
Julie-Alison Murray, programme manager for Prism, the Unilever
project to standardise and deliver business processes.
But the potential rewards were too great too ignore. “There was
the opportunity to be more efficient in IT departments by working
in a common manner. A regional supply chain increases purchasing
power for example,” says Murray.
Also, the ability to deliver a consistent service across the
entire business and identify hotspots depends upon using consistent
language and a single framework, says Thirlwall.
Prism was the outcome of these deliberations, and the project
eventually went on to be joint winner of the Project of the Year
Award at the itSMF Awards in November 2005.
The project’s initial goals, however, were to design and
implement six integrated processes across the organisation,
enabling IT to deliver common, affordable, consistent, reliable and
scalable services to the business. “ITIL was a great place to
start,” says Murray.
After meeting other ITIL users at the IT Service Management
forums, however, Unilever realised that successful ITIL
implementation depended upon the ability to change behaviour.
“It is not about writing and implementing processes, but about
changing the way that people work,” says Murray. This would not be
achieved by incremental or organic change, but by strong
leadership. Murray’s trump card was therefore to have the buy-in of
the global CIO.
At the launch of Prism, Murray arrived armed with a video of
global CIO Neil Cameron, who explained why the programme was
important to the future of Unilever and why everyone needed to play
their part.
“Some people came to the meeting with a look on their face of
‘I’ll see if it is for me’ and, after hearing the CIO’s message
left knowing it was going to happen,” Murray says. To remove any
lingering doubts, Cameron made every regional vice-president
accountable for the roll out of Prism.
Picking the right people to champion the change programme was
also essential. “It might have seemed logical to use process
specialists to lead the project given it was a project about
processes. In fact, the people found to be most suitable were
senior, very respected and big personalities.” The process experts
in turn became Prism team leaders in territories.
Customising ITIL for Prism proved straightforward. Although
government methods such as Prince2 have the reputation for being
heavy-duty tomes, the ITIL templates were succinct, says Murray.
“It was not overly complicated and we did not have to strip much
out. We had to strip out our own processes though.”
Unilever was using a mix of methods including ISO 9000,
different versions of ITIL and proprietary methods.
However out-of-the-box the ITIL processes, they were useless
until they were designed, or adapted to Unilever. This entailed
agreeing what constituted a ‘configuration item’ and the policies
that would evoke different actions within the process.
“For example, we had to decide whether configuration items
existed at server, component or service level,” says Murray.
A server can be logged as a single logical item or as its
various multiple components such as hard drives and software, for
example.
Unilever decided to create configuration items at server level
with components of the server as attributes. These configuration
items are then linked through “relationships” to each other to
define systems and services.
These conversations entailed “leaving all baggage at the door”,
but were essential to provide the context for the processes.
Simplicity was the key. “You are more likely to have a successful
configuration management database if you keep it simple – once you
gain maturity it becomes possible to expand it,” says Murray.
Crucially, the processes had to be designed to achieve level
four of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) from Carnegie Mellon
University, which specifies integration. Unilever deemed that it
needed to reach level four compliance by the end of 2006, an
upgrade of at least one level from Unilever’s existing
performance.
This goal was not driven by commercial considerations so much as
the need to have a professional framework in place, according to
Thirlwall. CMM provides an external benchmark for measuring the
performance of processes.
“The IT function needs to run to professional standards in the
same way that our accounts department does. This is not an optional
extra – it is a minimum professional standard.”
Clear communication was again important as the company moved to
the more global model and different cultures were exposed to each
other.
Murray had seen the potential for misunderstanding on an earlier
centralisation project. “The North Americans and British are very
different even though they use the same language.”
Spotting and bridging the differences that exist in a diverse
organisation was an early and major task. Unilever brought in
external consultants Pink Roccade and Pink Elephant at the outset
to do “gap analysis”.
“Some big things came out of this – most important of which was
that the lack of a common service management toolset was a real
inhibitor,” says Murray.
At the time, different varieties of system management were
deployed around the organisation, including different versions of
Remedy, Hewlett-Packard’s Openview and homemade tool cobbled out of
Excel and other databases.
“Even the different versions of Remedy were not capable of
joining up because they had been so configured,” says Murray.
Because Remedy was widely known and deployed, Unilever had no
hesitation in selecting it as the ITIL-ready management tool. The
steering board of Prism made the important decision that Remedy
should not be used to police the use of the processes, but to
support people in their new working practices.
“Even if procedures are locked down people can find ways of
breaking them,” says Murray.
Furthermore, “locking down” calls for greater configuration
makes upgrades more difficult. “As much as possible we wanted to
keep it out of the box,” says Murray.
For that reason, the only processes that are now locked down are
the ones approved by auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers, that relate
to finance and audit trails for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
To date, Prism has been rolled out across Unilever business
units in Europe, North America and the Middle East and Asia. Latin
America uses the same processes, but they are managed through
Siebel because of an existing outsourcing arrangement. However,
when that territory needs to link into anything global, staff
simply plug into Remedy, says Murray.
Cost savings within regions accompany the more mature processes,
says Thirlwall. “There is cost avoidance on information lifecycle
management. Buying hardware in advance means it can be purchased at
a better price.”
Similarly, since IT functions can be supported on a global
scale, capacity management can be done on a grander scale, rather
than project by project, which also brings economies.
ITIL has exceeded Unilever’s expectations in the scope and
vision it brings. “The biggest misunderstanding about ITIL is
created by the second ‘I’ for infrastructure,” says Thirlwall.
ITIL goes beyond infrastructure and reaches to application
development and support. “It is about end-to-end, but it means
effectiveness has to be designed in at the outset.”
Think of ITIL as being about better system and service
management and it becomes confined to how you run a helpdesk.
However, Unilever has found that ITIL can enable an announcement of
the sale of a frozen food company in Germany to be made with
greater confidence.
This broadness calls for new behaviours and skills from IT staff
around the world. “You start to understand how service delivery and
problem management affects everyone – and this broadens your
thinking beyond the traditional service silos,” says Thirlwall.
For example, when the IT department builds a SAP system, it is
thinking not just about programming interfaces, but about disaster
recovery and responsiveness from the outset.
In practical terms, this means that IT departments previously
focused on technology have been reorganised to deal with issues
such as capacity and availability.
“In the past a team may have been responsible for maintaining
Wintel or Unix platforms – now a capacity team will deal with the
two,” says Thirlwall.
The toughest part of Prism was managing heavy-duty change within
a given resource. “You have to do your day job at the same time
–and stay within budget,” says Thirlwall. Implementing ITIL as a
project was essential to ensure it happened, but now it is a way of
life.
What is prism?
Prism is a set of common processes and practices for Unilever IT
for six areas: incident, problem, change, configuration, release
and service level management. Prism has also supported legislative
compliance regulations by ensuring all processes are Sarbanes-Oxley
compliant.
What is ITIL?
The IT Infrastructure Library is a series of documents used to
aid the implementation of a framework for IT service management.
The framework is customisable and defines how service management is
applied within an organisation.
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