BUSINESS PROCESSES
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Compuware Six Sigma champion Linh C. Ho |
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 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.
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.
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.
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