Managing IT services for customer satisfaction:
Combining Six Sigma quality with
UK government ITIL business process standards
By Jon Fernquest |
Software is notoriously difficult to build and maintain.
When your car engine breaks down, there are very few ways to repair the engine.
When software breaks down, the programmer can repair it many different ways, some of them leading to future headaches for the people who have to use the software.
If the software is not tested properly, there may be "bugs," flaws in the software that only appear later.
Businesses invest large amounts of money in software that is critical for the everyday operations of their business.
Ensuring the quality of this software and that customer needs are met in a timely manner, has never been easy.
Today's Bangkok Post article is about a new way of measuring and ensuring the quality of service that business software provides customers.
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(On right, the Six Sigma logo and Compuware's headquarters in Detroit.)
Here is the article in full:
BUSINESS PROCESSES
Six Sigma and ITIL is 'a marriage made in heaven
DON SAMBANDARAKSAWednesday August 27, 2008
IT departments are increasingly looking towards adopting "Six Sigma," a business management concept with roots dating back to the 1920s, but formalised by Motorola in the 1980s. The three basic elements of Six Sigma are process improvement, continuous process design and redesign, and process management.
The adoption of Six Sigma is hoped to plug the gap in the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) between the "what to do" and "how to do it" when it comes to delivering on aligning business and IT through IT service management (ITSM) and meeting service level agreements (SLAs), according to one of the leaders in enterprise IT management, Compuware.
Compuware's Six Sigma champion and ITIL expert Linh C. Ho was speaking at a series of road shows in Asia, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and took time out to explain how Six Sigma and ITIL is a marriage made in heaven.
Six Sigma
Six Sigma was introduced to the manufacturing world by Motorola, and later taken on and evangelised by GE. The core idea is eliminating defects that cost money and impact a business's bottom line.
The goal is to achieve six sigma value, or 3.4 defects per million opportunities, be it in manufacturing components or, in our context, IT services. Moreover, it is aimed at making quality consistently and sustainably high.
In fact, 3.4 defects per million is roughly equivalent to "seven nines" (99.99999 per cent), outstripping the "five nines" often quoted as a goal by IT departments today.
At the core of Six Sigma is DMAIC (Define, Manufacture, Analyse, Improve and Control), and each phase has techniques and tools to help analyse data sets and provide information.
IT infrastructure library (ITIL)
ITIL is a set of books in IT infrastructure management. ITIL Version 3 was launched last summer, and added a continual service improvement phase to the process (previous versions saw IT projects with a finite beginnings and ends rather than services that are continually delivered).
Many corporations in the US and Europe have embraced ITIL and combined it with Six Sigma or TQM (Total Quality Management). Ho named Sun Microsystems, WiPro and the Bank of America, among others, as pioneers in this field.
Six Sigma's value has been to assign a monetary value - a business value - correlating to poor quality of a product. If you apply that to ITSM, it means that it gives you a tangible value tied to a service level that can be clearly shown in reports and dashboards.
Ho explained that another benefit of merging ITIL and Six Sigma is that Six Sigma comes from the business side and uses business language that management is more comfortable with.
She explained that much of Six Sigma can map directly onto ITIL. For instance, ITIL has five phases, five books that start from education and putting a process in place, to maintaining a processes consistency.
However, while ITIL tells you what to do, Six Sigma goes into much more detail, with tools and methodologies on how to do it, plus it adds a sixth phase of sustainably to the ITIL framework.
Ho said that the response of her talk was very positive, with many companies in India such as WiPro already combining the two.
Most companies are today well versed in ITIL. She noted that Singapore has an IT Service Management Forum and Malaysia is also thinking of establishing one to enable IT managers to share their experiences.
Compuware ITIL and ITSM
Asked how Compuware's message on ITIL and ITSM differs from that of IBM and HP, also powerful advocates in this marketplace, Ho focused on her company, explaining that not only does Compuware train its own professional service staff on ITIL V3, but its key software product, Vantage, is built around the ITIL framework and underpins a lot of what she just explained.
She said that Vantage's strength is in how the dashboard provides visibility to the right audience. It can present the same real-time data at a business service management level, a user experience level or a more conventional application performance level.
By applying Six Sigma, and creating business models linking IT services to business outcomes in the dashboard, Vantage can show executives the cost of poor quality in their IT services in real-time, she explained.
(Source: Bangkok Post, Database, 27-08-08, DON SAMBANDARAKSA, temp-link)
Vocabulary:
IT Management Vocabulary
IT service management (ITSM) - management of information technology (IT) systems (business computers) focuses on customers rather than the technology (See Wikipedia)
IT infrastructure library (ITIL) - a series of books on IT management topics published by British government that give "a detailed description of a number of important IT practices with comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that can be tailored to any IT organization" (See Wikipedia)
Six Sigma - a method of controlling businesses that uses statistics and can be certified, improves operating efficiency, reduce variations, avoid defects and reduces waste, achieves a failure rate of 3.4 parts per million or 99.9997%, a quality management and process improvement methodology particularly well-suited to process-intensive industries like manufacturing (See Google Definitions and Wikipedia)
adopting - starting to use
adopting Six Sigma - starting to use Six Sigma
Compuware - a software company with products aimed at the information technology (IT) departments of large businesses. The company's services also include testing, development and management software for programs running on mainframe computer and client-server systems. Compuware customers include 70+% of Fortune 500 companies, with more than 23,000 customers around the world.
(See Wikipedia)
defects - a fault or imperfection in a thing
defects per million
DMAIC (Define, Manufacture, Analyse, Improve and Control) -
TQM (Total Quality Management) - a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs (See Wikipedia)
a service level - a measure of how well customer orders can be executed at delivery conditions accepted in the market, a measure of perceived customer satisfaction
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - contracts between service providers and customers that define the service level provided and measures of the service level provided (metrics) (See Wikipedia)
tangible - easily seen and measured
tangible value - value that you can see and measure easily
tangible value tied to a service level - value you can measure that defines a service level
a process - a series of actions performed to achieve a result
a business process - a set of related, structured activities (a chain of events) that produces a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers (See Wikipedia)
consistent, consistently - always behaving or working in the same way (without deviations or errors)
consistency, maintaining consistency - always being consistent, working in the same way
sustainably - can keep doing over long periods of time
a dashboards - a software dashboard (set of widgets) current key performance indicators (in real time) so that management can respond quickly to changes, a visualization tool (See Wikipedia)
real-time - without delay, when it actually happens
real-time data - data describing what is happening right now (no delay)
General Vocabulary
a marriage made in heaven - work very well together
notoriously - famous for something bad
formalised - made into system
a road show - a show that tours around the country or world, trying to generate interest in a new company, product, or service
evangelise - try to convert people to your way of thinking or beliefs
technology evangelist - a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market (See Wikipedia)
outstripping - doing better than
finite beginnings and endings - has a limited duration and time period (rather than being ongoing, never stopping)
pioneers in this field - the first people to work in this field or area
correlating to - associated with, depends on
underpins - supports, is the basis of, is the foundation of
