Blade Watch

In terms of process and delivery, there are so many examples, where organizations have brought in new technologies, new services, but not adapted or modernized the background processes both in terms of your helpdesk process and in the way the teams work together.

So Mike, (we’ll call him), sent me a wonderful illustration of this. He’d started at a financial organization as a server engineer, and got told, order yourself a Blackberry and a laptop.

He logged a call through the helpdesk, requesting a laptop and a Blackberry. A lady (Janet we’ll call her) about 30 feet from him, responsible for the organizatios mobile technologies called and said, “can you print out mobile devices request form, sign it and then fax it back to me?”

The process was manual and worked as follows:

1. Mike faxes to Janet the form signed by him saying he wants a Blackberry and laptop.
2. Janet puts that in the filing system (an A4 ring binder with the month and Mobile phone requests/laptop requests).
3. Janet then sends an email to Anthony, (Mike’s Manager) who sits next to Mike and asks can we buy him these devices, Anthony says yes by email, she prints that out, staples it to the purchase request form that Mike faxed.
4. Janet then raises a call to the laptop team requesting a laptop, then she raises a call to the mobile phone team for a mobile phone. She then waits for the devices to be purchased and configured, then delivered to her desk.
5. Janet then asks Mike to come over and sign another form stating that he takes ownership and liability for the devices listed. This is then stapled to the original faxed request.
6. Janet then logs a mobile technologies billing form to the mobile billing team to bill Mike’s mobile to his cost center. She then logs a call to ensure that the laptop is billed to his department sending it to the desktop team.

Janet’s job is to co-ordinate people’s calls, to ensure they are correctly ordered and billed back to the relevant team.

• The actual delivery time for the Blackberry – 48hours from the request to the voice team, who simply requet a handset and contract from their mobile phone provider.
• The actual delivery time for the laptop – 48 hours to build and configure – (IT normally has at least three or four pre-ordered laptops ready for supply). New/specific requests would take five business days including build and configuration.

The user percevied lead time:

• Mobile phone – 5 working days – 1 of which usually involving paperwork being sent back and forward, billing organization and cross charging
• Laptop – ten working days, there was the back office IT aspects to work out,a survey, a check is it the small or the medium laptop you want, do you need an external mouse and a laptop bag? The host name allocation, and discussions about the applications you wanted installed, then the operating system load and configuration.

Issues from listening to Mike:

• IT had taken the purchase request process written quite some time ago to purchase a desktop computer/server and changed the individual tasks for each call, the process was made to fit around mobile phones and laptops not adapted around the different nature of the requests. Laptops/mobile phones are more fluid devices and change more regularly, they are more user specific.
• IT did not have a budget or drive for process improvement, it worked on the basis of business as usual.
• There were many systems to manage assets, to organize purchase approvals, but none of them spoke to each other or linked into each other. Therefore a simple process to order a phone required a full time member of staff to co-ordinate and manage call progress.
• Users did not complain, there was no issue from a user standpoint. IT delivered a service which therefore was deemed satisfactory.

What has to change:

• Consolidation of operating system builds to two, a laptop and desktop build.
• Blackberry configuration loading from the mobile phone service provider so IT plugged it in and sync’d it with the exchange server.
• A backoffice web based tool to handle the different aspects of the laptop and mobile provisioning process. When a call got logged, the manager got emailed, they had to sign into the tool, press ok, and that the generated each teams’ task. One view, one tool. Removal of all paperwork into a database powered web interface.
• A process change, the asset management team managing devices by phone number or computer name, combined with their asset number. When they allocated an asset number, they would also allocate a host name or mobile number.
• A combination of the laptop, mobile and desktop asset registers, so that there was one gold source of data, one tool which all the teams used. Avoiding duplication of data and three different sources of data each reporting different information.

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