Wanted: Technology to Drive Process

“Technology driving process; It’s not supposed to work that way.”

Anyone with formal training in process engineering knows you start with defining and optimizing your processes, and then use technology to streamline those processes. In an ideal world, this works perfectly. Layer organizational structures, system ownership and governance models, and personalities, and people naturally gravitate towards what they know best; technology.

A number of years ago I began moving my Infrastructure & Operations division to more of a process-based organization. I, and my management team, attended a series of seminars given by the late Dr. Michael Hammer. We received our certificates in “Process Mastery” and, with our newfound evangelical powers, were ready to transform the organization.

Barbara, having a reputation as an overachiever, volunteered her group, the Desktop Support, Engineering, and Help Desk department, as the first to make the move into the world of process. Over the period of a year, Barbara documented existing processes, designed new process where others were missing, created a process map, developed Service Level Agreements with users and other IT groups, and conducted training sessions with her team. The results were better delegation of tasks to the right individuals; managing to metrics, happier employees, and, most importantly, improved service levels.

As Barbara’s manager, I pushed for more improvement. Barbara responded by identifying Help Desk requests that could not be resolved on the first call and required assistance from others in the IT organization. In reviewing the list, Barbara realized 30% of the tasks could be shifted to the Help Desk and drive down costs while dramatically improving resolution time for the user. Requests such as resetting passwords, granting access to network file shares, provisioning user logins, email accounts, and printers, distribution of remote access security tokens and instructions, and creation of new user profiles were all currently being performed by senior systems administrators. The management team thought Barbara’s idea was great, and she was empowered to make it happen.

Barbara thought this would be simple. She had achieved what she thought was buy-in from the entire infrastructure and operations organization. What she didn’t expect was resistance around what people believed gave them power. Employees in other groups were fine giving over these mundane tasks so long as they still had control over approving each transaction. They felt this authority (and the trust that went along with it) is what made them special to me and others in the IT organization. What they failed to see was the erosion in the level of respect they received when they complained about not having enough resources, but failed to seize this opportunity.

The solution came through implementing technologies enabling Help Desk personnel to grant user privileges without being server administrators. Once the systems administrators saw they had not lost any control, were able to delegate tasks to the Help Desk, and were able to focus on more high value projects, they began to think about methods to offload other processes to the Help Desk. Success was achieved.

The lesson from this story is the need to discover what drives people before reengineering their processes. In this situation, the sense of control the ability to manage the technology was the drivers for the Systems Administrators. Empowering the Systems Administrators to use technology and enable the transferring of some of their processes made them supporters and eventually advocates.

In the case of the Systems Administrators, they defined their processes by technology. Therefore, technology became their driver for re-engineering their processes.

Some of the “squishier” skills, such as process, project management, client management, and budget management can be difficult for administrators and operators to understand or appreciate, and can be in conflict with their priorities. In a production IT shop, keeping systems up and running and eliminating any user downtime is the top priority. Asking people to take time away from their priorities, particularly in these challenging times, may be counter-productive and may produce defensive behavior. Take care in understanding your audience .