[LINK] itNews: 'Vic DHS takes on ITIL-inspired structure'
Roger Clarke
Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Fri Sep 14 08:44:01 AEST 2012
[After Rachel's comment yesterday that "'ITIL' ... I think stands for
'IT Is Losing' or 'Idiots Training Idiots Legitimately' but I think
it actually means 'Process comes before Productivity'", the following
was inevitable.]
Victorian Human Services to cut 15 percent of staff
By James Hutchinson on Sep 14, 2012 7:00 AM (1 hour ago)
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/315461,victorian-human-services-to-cut-15-percent-of-staff.aspx
Takes on ITIL-inspired structure.
The Victorian Department of Human Services is set to cut up to 15
percent of its IT staff by December under an ongoing restructure of
the 12,000-employee department.
About 40 IT workers are expected to be cut from the 300-strong office
through voluntary redundancies and area consolidation over the next
three months.
Remaining workers will move to a new structure based on the ITIL
version 3 framework.
Chief information officer Grahame Coles told the Forrester CIO Summit
on Thursday that the IT branch so far had received seven redundancy
applications from staff who had been at the department more than 20
years and received "attractive" packages this week.
Other cuts would come from consolidating application-specific support
personnel into a single helpdesk, while reducing the IT branch's
service operations and applications development areas.
However, the restructure had also caused the department to open a new
service design department and increase information management and
architecture roles, charged with leading more than $20 million worth
of applications and projects planned for the coming year.
The IT restructure was part of a department-wide restructure first
flagged in February and aimed at reducing its headcount by a total of
500 people through redundancy packages.
Coles said the move was "probably the largest reform program" in the
department's existence; one that would see the department shift from
eight silos to 17 geographic areas and three central policy areas
governing the department's wide responsibility base.
All 12,000 staff will be shifted into new roles or one of the areas
by December 14.
Coles said the department spent 18 months and $13 million to update
applications for the restructure, focusing largely on case management
applications and role changes required for managers to allow for the
redundancies.
It is the first phase in the department's Services Connect program, a
project that aimed to make the organisation more efficient while
leading to a single point of contact between both state and federal
departments for Victorians in need of assistance.
ITIL strategy
Coles said the majority of the IT projects planned under Services
Connect had been paused in recent months as his office moved to
grapple with a new structure under the ITIL framework.
"We actually picked up the processes within ITIL and we dropped them
into the areas that would be accountable for those processes," he
said.
"One of the key things we had to do to try and give the staff real
clarity in this is we had to get the hand-offs right - we've used the
ITIL processes to show how groups will hand off from business
engagement to strategy to design and how design hands off to projects
and how projects hands off to BAU."
While many were initially resistant to changes in structure within
the IT office, Coles said most had since become supportive of the new
framework.
"We started on the back foot - we started this process effectively
with some very unhappy staff," he said.
"Most of the restructure in IM&T is based on a service model, we're
trying to work out what services we're going to provide and how many
people we actually think we need for those services."
The IT office had undergone several changes in recent years,
including moving from ten individual offices into a single branch
under a strategic CIO role, which Coles filled.
"I remember when I started, because I was the head of one of those
ten [managers], my boss said 'you can ignore the CIO, he's only a
dotted line'," he said.
Coles told iTnews the department had moved forward with future
planned projects, including building out its trial of iPads for case
workers.
The agency would expand an existing fleet of 40 employee-owned and
100 department-owned tablets, all managed on a cloud-based version of
the AirWatch mobile device management solution, to avoid paper-based
documentation.
--
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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