Dedicated to Improvement: A Canadian Approach to ITIL
By Rick Mitchell

Whether it's his Japanese garden at home or IT service management tools at work, David Chiu likes to improve things. Chiu's recent promotion at a Canadian financial services firm has him supervising continuous improvement of ITIL® processes. "It's a natural thing for me to do, from a structure and process point of view. I've always done some sort of process improvement," he says.

Chiu, who hails from Markham, a town northeast of Toronto, studied mechanical engineering at the University of Waterloo, but, he says, "I've always been fascinated by computers." His first job after graduation was at Bombardier Aircraft as a programmer and later as technology-support leader for the computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD-CAM) department. "We took off-the-shelf programs and developed and customized them for aircraft engineers." After eight years at Bombardier, Chiu started with his current firm in 1997, managing application support for capital market traders. Chiu says the transition was fairly easy. "The businesses are different, of course, but technology is technology, and I was still dealing with technical people. I made a step up from tech lead to manager.”

The banking and finance company employs some 34,000 people in Canada, the United States and the European Union. Its behemoth IT services operation is a constant challenge to maintain. In 2001 the firm began adopting the ITIL framework, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Developed during the 1980s by a U.K. government agency, ITIL was initially a set of five books by industry specialists, documenting state-of-the-art IT procedures known as best practices. It quickly became the worldwide business framework for quality IT service management. The key, says Chiu, is flexibility that allows corporations to overcome difficulties inherent in their rapidly expanding IT systems. "ITIL can be customized to a particular organization, following basic principles," says Chiu. "It provides a methodical and consistent way of managing IT assets across the enterprise."

In 2001 the bank began the process of shifting from a culture based on technology to one based on IT service management. Since then, Chiu has helped design five ITIL processes (capacity management, configuration management, incident management, and release and change management), initially to support the capital market trading group. (The ITIL program has subsequently been rolled out to the bank's other groups.) He specialized in configuration management (CM), which manages interactions between hardware, software and services, storing information in a database, the CMDB (configuration management database). "Configuration management is the ITIL process I like most, because its an underlying process that ties all the others together," Chiu says. The CMDB holds relationship data (i.e., technical dependencies) between IT assets and their configuration information, as compared with an IT asset management repository, which focuses on storing financial information about those assets.

With multiple concurrent projects, the ITIL project team consists of process owners, each responsible for a single process's design, ensuring all the firm’s units comply with that process. Each design is treated as a project and process managers, assisted by coordinators, each oversee day-to-day execution, compliance and training for one process within a single unit in the organization. Managers supervise core design teams of six to eight people, including an outside ITIL consultant, a process analyst for technical documentation and three to six subject matter experts.

It's a complex arrangement, says Chiu. "We had a lot of IT people working in the same programs, but not necessarily communicating as well as they could." So late last year he proposed that someone head a continuous-improvement program. Management said, "Great idea," and gave him the job, which seems reasonable to him: "I know quite a bit about the tools and processes," says Chiu, "I also like to see the 'big picture' in things."

Since January, Chiu has worked with process owners, providing a bridge between developers and implementers and support people. He works to ensure that deployed systems are supportable, and that enterprise infrastructure is maintained. Chiu, who recently completed a leadership-training course, says that, above all, "My main job is to ensure the process continues to improve."

Once you create an ITIL process, you have to make sure it's not just gathering dust. "The difficult part is not designing or implementing the process. It is the execution, and getting people to follow it," says Chiu. "So, after the rollout, you have to measure compliance and quality. That's where metrics come in." Chiu's presentation at ECP’s SAM Summit ’05 in May in Los Angeles will focus on using metrics, process measurement and governance to evaluate a process's value to an organization. "If you can't demonstrate value, the process has to be fixed," he says.

The measurement tools are mainly key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, one KPI evaluates time efficiency. "You can design an inefficient process that takes up more time than it is worth," says Chiu, adding, "It's no good if you introduce a system that costs a million bucks but doesn't do what it's supposed to do."

Chiu gives an example of ITIL processes in action—someone wants to install a software update. ITIL spells out the rules you have to follow. "Each process has a step 1, step 2, step 3, etc. In this case, first, you submit a request to make a change. Once that's approved, you have to determine where to make the installation. The CMBD has to be updated with accurate data. And you have to make sure you update all servers. If you were to update just one, that could have disastrous results. But you can't just shut down a server that's in use. You have to check what's running first. If you shut down a server that has applications running on it, the next thing you know the whole trading floor is down."

The IT specialists shouldn't forget how the company makes its money. In his employer’s case, that means making sure banking systems are always available, up to date and working properly. "Production is a sacred environment," says Chiu, his tone low and serious, adding, "You want [to provide] high-quality, on-time IT service, available seven days a week, 24 hours a day. You can never say 'maybe'."

In conferences and company communication, the bank has gotten positive feedback on its progress in implementing ITIL. "Based on what we've observed, we are advanced in our ITIL process implementation compared with most companies in North America." says Chiu. He enjoys speaking at conferences, because they allow him to contribute to the flow of information on ITIL implementation, and to learn from others. He also wrote the configuration management chapter for a book on implementing IT service, due out in March from the Help Desk Institute (www.thinkhdi.com). His white paper "Modeling the Enterprise IT Infrastructure" is available online (http://www.ecpmedia.com/publicdownloads_open/ Modeling_The_Enterprise_IT_ Infrastructure_Chiuand_Tsui.pdf).

After this year, the bank will have one more process, availability management, to move to ITIL. The company has begun consolidating and integrating systems and service management tools to improve efficiency and standardization.

When spring finally reaches Canada, Chiu, will start working in his garden. There will always be weeds to pull, seeds to sow and plants to prune, as in his work he tries to constantly add to his knowledge of available tools and methods. "There's always room for improvement," says David Chiu.

Rick Mitchell is based in Paris and is a contributing editor to ECP publications.