[LINK] itNews: 'Vic DHS takes on ITIL-inspired structure'

[Roger Clarke]

[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