Transition To Remote Infrastructure Management – An Itil Approach

As an IT infrastructure manager, you have been challenged by your CIO to look beyond the horizon and test the waters of remote infrastructure management.

Cost is clearly a key driver for your CIO and moving the IT infrastructure services remote (using a remote outsource service provider or setting up a shared service environment) will provide you the obvious cost arbitrage.

You realize that it is but a matter of time, before your company joins the offshore bandwagon for its infrastructure services. You need to prepare for the next obvious question. Which areas of the IT infrastructure are best suited to moving into a remote services framework? What mix or remote and onsite services will give you the right cost and performance leverage?

The key step at this point is to understand the detail, complexity and performance of your existing infrastructure components. A common mistake at this stage is to jump headlong into a remote management strategy without a thorough view of how your infrastructure elements relate to each other and which your big cost ‘buckets’ are.

Mapping your current teams into the following matrix is a useful first step.

This matrix rates the relative importance of the IT infrastructure components in terms of its business impact i.e how critical is the segment in its alignment to the business goals and direction?

It also measures the difficulty in offshoring the components in terms of the standardization/technology investment and the impact on people.

You can also use it to compare the relative savings for different areas of services. This also forms a framework for you to prioritize which pieces of the infrastructure landscape can be moved remote.

While this analysis is useful in arriving at a high level understanding of which segments can be offshored and the cost savings, there are pitfalls to ‘going remote’ if your team structure and current processes are not conducive.

While there are many ways by which you can assess you current baseline, a good measure to check whether your current state is conducive to ‘going remote’ is your alignment to ITIL.

ITIL (IT infrastructure library) has been increasingly used over the last decade as a framework for aligning the IT services and has been found to yield strong benefits to the adaptors. While there are obvious benefits like structured teams with proper job descriptions and alignment to business, there is growing evidence that ITIL framework helps in making your IT infrastructure ‘offshore-able’.

If your infrastructure management is not efficient and structured, moving to a remote management can prove to be quite a challenge. This is because knowledge transfer to the new supplier/remote team is critical to the success of the project, but if the IT and business knowledge is not documented, there is every chance that the new team will struggle to provide high quality of service. This may come as a surprise to some who may argue that ‘IT infrastructure support is only dependant on the knowledge of the IT components (operating system, hardware etc. but it is a fact that practical business contextual knowledge is a key component of IT infrastructure service. It may not be an overstatement to say that understanding and supporting the IT infrastructure has a critical dependency on understanding the application and business landscape it supports.

ITIL puts a lot of emphasis on RCCA (root cause and corrective actions) and a sound RCCA process is key to understand your infrastructure and its quirks. This ITIL problem management tool is critical not only to transfer knowledge to the remote team, but also ensures that you continue to understand and monitor the performance of the new team on the basis of how well they come up with perceptive root causes and sustainable long terms resolution.

Trend analysis as part of problem management is another useful mechanism for knowledge transfer. The new team gets a perspective of the historical issues and the current trends. Trend analysis also provides a good baseline to decide where to focus key resources.

Proper implementation of CMDB database ensures that the critical ‘black box’ of the infrastructure configs is documented. Understanding and maintaining the customized configs which optimize the performance of applications that run on the servers is an important aspect of the knowledge transfer to the remote team and can ensure the success of the transition.

To summarize, the ITIL framework is not only an effective framework of improving your IT performance but also provides an excellent baseline to evaluate remote infrastructure management. An ITIL implementation streamlines your processes and de-humanizes it to an extent, making it more conducive and ready for moving it remote. To conclude, an ITIL approach combined with the ‘offshoreability’ matrix framework can form the essential first steps towards moving to a remote infrastructure support framework.

By: Shivkumar Gopalan

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Source: Outsourcing Leadership Forum