IT Service Management at Sundsvall Municipality
november 14, 2011
In this article, the Swedish municipality of Sundsvall talks of a successful service management project, where the IT organization implemented fully integrated and consistent processes for all services – based on ITIL. Today, Sundsvall Municipality is proud of the tangible improvements in the service delivery in terms of increased efficiency and higher quality – resulting in measurable economic benefits.
A Service-Oriented Approach
In 2006 it was decided at Sundsvall Municipality to establish a centralized and consistent IT organization. The ambition for the future service delivery was to provide a well-documented and transparent customer/supplier relationship.
Project Manager Niklas Olsson tells us about the considerations that led up to this service management project: “We needed more structure and a clear overview of our service offerings. Our customers also needed an overview of our services in order to set the right expectations to our deliveries. Furthermore, we wanted to create a foundation that could enable us to plan ahead. In general, we needed to structure our service deliveries to be able to bill correctly and to become a transparent and reliable service organization for our customers.”
Why Service Catalog?
The first step in the service management project at Sundsvall Municipality was to create the basic conditions for efficient configuration management and to set up a functional CMDB, thereby securing control over the service delivery infrastructure. Time and energy was also invested in securing information for future purposes by creating consistent processes, working routines and support. A major part of the routines and processes that maintain the CMDB are today automated.
Next step was the creation of a service catalog, describing and defining all services available to the customers: the prices and terms for pricing in general, the types of support connected to the respective services and a definition of the resources required to live up to the agreed service level agreements.
Niklas Olsson tells us: “For our project the work revolved around the service catalog and we considered this of high importance. However, I think that starting a service management project, everybody must find out where it hurts the most, and find a long-term solution to their particular problems.
For us the service catalog would facilitate cooperation with our customers regarding a long term planning of the development of our services. The ambition was to create a basis for metrics, follow-up, long-term planning and a detailed pricing of actual deliveries.”
Building a Service Catalog in POB
”In POB we found a structure which put a logical order to everything and at the same time a platform for administering our services and the entire complexity of relations between services, SLA’s, CI’s, cases, time registration, billing and metrics,” Niklas Olsson says and continues: “I have to mention that we got a lot of support from our implementation partner Accero, who guided us through all issues related to both ITIL and POB. Personally I think that it is important to get the proper support to a project like this in order to make the right long-term decisions. We had a great advantage in finding a partner which had insight in both theory and product. This led to a project based on reality and not just an abstract and theoretical solution, which is a common risk with projects like this.”
POB supporting ITIL
“The project was based on ITIL as the basic framework, and POB was always supporting the overall intentions behind the project. When we started out defining a process we often looked at POB to see how POB suggested the process should be and from that we evaluated how this would work for our organization. I am actually surprised to see how many times we got a really good long-term result from this method,” says Niklas Olsson.
The project has become a great success and so much so that it has inspired other municipalities in Sweden to do the same. Among these is Skellefteå Municipality who, in their own POB project, has had much benefit from the lessons learnt at Sundsvall.