Cath Jennings
Nottingham Building Society is in the process of adopting a
business-oriented approach to service level management, which will
link the performance of IT systems and services directly to
business activities.
The decision to move in this direction was taken by IT director
Jack Cutts, who was taken on by the firm about two-and-a-half years
ago to update its core mortgage systems.
Initial work involved stabilising existing systems before
undertaking a complete IT infrastructure refresh, which included
introducing systems management products for the first time.
"There was no monitoring in the organisation at all, so the only
time we knew there was an issue was when users or customers told
us. But we've got finite resources to spend on IT and we wanted to
move the balance away from support-and-fix to adding value. So we
felt that the more proactive we could be about things, the more
effective that shift would be," Cutts says.
As a result the building society, which employs more than 500
staff, rolled out service level management (SLM) applications from
Nimsoft and built a graphical
dashboard to pictorially represent 12 monitoring areas, one of
which included the firms 32 branches.
The next stage in the process, however, will be to introduce
business-driven service level agreements (SLAs) based on asking
senior business managers 10 key questions about how they wish their
IT services to be delivered. Topics will include 'are the right
systems available when you need them to be?' and 'are support staff
courteous?'.
Cutts explains the rationale, "If I ask the head of marketing,
for example, are you happy with your systems being available 99.99
per cent of the time, they'll probably say 'yes'. But if I say 'so
it's OK if I take the system down every 13 days for an hour at
12pm?', they're not likely to be so happy."
The problem with
SLAs in this context, he says, is that they "sometimes drive
the wrong behaviours and if they're too top level, they could be
causing customer dissatisfaction." This is not least because "if
you ask the business what level of availability they want, they
won't necessarily understand the question. So you can pick
something that makes you look successful, but that takes away
trust".
Moreover, he adds, while "you can create statistics to prove
anything, it doesn't mean you're providing a good service or that
the customer thinks you're doing a good job". As a result, the
questions are intended to act as a discussion point to enable "each
department to create their own way of assessing whether we are
doing a good job".
"We have numbers around things like availability to help them
make the call, but sometimes it's the softer stuff that you don't
get to hear about. So if we're getting six out of 10 from one
department, we can ask them what their issues are and drive up the
SLAs as they become more focused and targeted," Cutts explains.
The openness of the discussion process, he believes, will, in
turn, help to create better relationships between the business and
IT. "If they're consistently giving you a low mark, they have to
justify that, but if they mark us 10 out of 10 each time, they
can't really complain. But it's not about a numbers game, it's
about making things better," he says.
Cutts warns, however, that it is only possible to adopt such an
approach if the IT department is providing a good basic service and
has suitable monitoring tools in place. He also believes that the
IT team needs to be provided with incentives to carry through on
any changes.
"I'm putting SLA performance into my personal objectives and
that of my team because if they're not linked in, there's no reason
to engage. It shows my real commitment to this approach as I don't
feel that you can do this kind of thing half-heartedly," he
concludes.