ITIL-ITSM tagteam boosts Mexican ISP INFOTEC's operations quality

The next BriefingsDirect IT systems performance innovation case study interview highlights how INFOTEC in Mexico City improves its service desk and monitoring operations and enjoys impressive results -- an incident reduction of more than 20 percent -- from those efforts.

INFOTEC needed to react better to systems failures, to significantly reduce the time to repair, and to learn from those failures to prevent future ones. Now, by deploying advanced IT service management (ITSM) tools, the ISP's users have a much higher quality of dependable service.

To learn more about how they obtained such improvements, we're joined by Victor Hugo Piña García, the Service Desk and Monitoring Manager at INFOTEC. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Piña: INFOTEC is a Government Research Center. We have many activities. The principal ones are teaching, innovation technology, and IT consulting. The goal is to provide IT services. We have many IT services like data centers, telecommunications, service desk, monitoring, and manpower.

Gardner: This is across Mexico, the entire country?

Piña: Yes, it covers all the national territory. We have two locations. The principal is in Mexico City; San Fernando, and the Aguascalientes City is the other point we offer the services.

Gardner: Explain your role as the Service Desk and Monitoring Manager. What are you responsible for?

Three areas

Piña: My responsibility is in three areas. The first is the monitoring, to review all of the service, the IT components for the clients.

The second is the service desk, management of incidents and problems. Third is the generation of the deliveries of all the services of INFOTEC. We make deliveries for the IT service managers and service delivery.

Gardner: So it's important for organizations to know their internal operations, all the devices, and all the assets and resources in order to create these libraries. One of the great paybacks is that you can reduce time to resolution and you can monitor and have much greater support.

Give us a sense of what was going on before you got involved with ITIL and IT service management (ITSM), so that we can then better understand what you got as a benefit from it. What was it like before you were able to improve on your systems and operations?

Piña: We support the services with HP tools, HP products. We have many types of assets for adaptation and for solution. Then we create a better process. We align the process with the HP tools and products. Within two years we began to see benefits to service a customer.

We attained a better service level in two ways. First is the technical report, the failures. And second, the moment the failure is reported, we send specialists to attend to the failure. That reduces considerably the time to repair. As a consequence, users have a better level of service. Our values changed in the delivery of the service.

Gardner: I see that you have had cost reductions of up to one third in some areas, a 40 percent reduction in time to compliance, with service desk requests going from seven or eight minutes previously down to five minutes. It’s a big deal, an incident reduction of more than 20 percent. How is this possible? How were these benefits generated? Is it the technology, people, process, all the above?

Piña: Yes, we consider four things. The people with their service is the first. The process with innovative mindset, the technology, is totally enabled to align with the previous two points, and the fourth, consistent and integral to the work in terms of the above three points.

Gardner: It sounds to me as if together these can add up to quite a bit of cost savings, a significant reduction in the total cost of operations.

Piña: Yes, that’s correct.

Gardner: Is there anything in particular that you're interested in and looking for next from HP? How could they help you do even more?

New concept and model

Piña: I've discovered many things. First, we need to know better and think about how we take these to generate a new concept, a new model, and a new process to operate and offer services.

There have been so many ideas. We need to process that and understand it, and we need to support HP Mexico to know how to deal with these new things.

Gardner: Are there any particular products that you might be going to, now that you've been able to attain a level of success? What might come next, more ITIL, more configuration management, automation, business service management? Do you have any thoughts about your next steps?

Piña: Yes. We use ITIL methodology to make changes. When we present a new idea, we're looking for the impact -- economic, social, and political -- when the committee has a meeting to decide.

This is a good idea. This has a good impact. It's possible and proven, and then right there, we make it the new model of business for delivering our new service. We're thinking about the cloud, about big data, and about security. I don’t want to promise anything.

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