ITIL Foundations, Day 1
September 13th, 2006 | by Tim Wilson |Whew! That’s a lot of material. I walked into class this morning and had a thick binder full of detailed ITIL info waiting for me. The terminology is dense and there are a lot of new concepts to absorb. There are only six of us in the class, and I’m the only one from the K–12 world. I asked a lot of questions, most of which seemed fairly intelligent sounding at the time.
I continue to wonder how best to map these IT service management concepts from the corporate culture to the work I do in a school district. There’s so much that is common between all of us who do this work, but there are some key differences. Our instructor works for Northwest Airlines. If their IT systems fail they might lose huge money in lost reservations. (I don’t think he worries much about planes falling out of the sky.) If mine fail I might have hundreds of students and teachers whose activities are ruined for a period of time. Those are both high stakes, but the way to measure them seems quite different to me.
Measuring performance is very important in the ITIL processes. My stack of materials has key performance indicators (KPIs) for each process. Here are a few examples from the Incident Management process (IM in ITIL-speak refers to what most people recognize as a traditional help desk/tech support request):
- total number of incidents
- mean cost per incident
- incidents processed per service desk workstation
- number and percentage of incidents resolved remotely, without an on-site visit
Does your school district’s IT department measure their performance like that? Mine doesn’t…yet. 
My ITIL book stresses the importance of collecting baseline data and measuring performance against it. I don’t have any baseline data. It’s never been collected.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what metrics make sense in a school setting. Something like “number of students and teachers affected per incident” or “instructional time lost per incident” perhaps. I need to find a way to incorporate metrics like that. It will make them more relevant to our “business” and communicate more clearly to teachers and administrators than the geekier alternatives.
What other metrics would make sense for a school IT department? I’d love to hear some suggestions. I’ll keep posting on this, but for now I need to dig in and do some studying. I’ve got the exam on Friday.
Tags: ITIL
8 Responses to “ITIL Foundations, Day 1”
By Tim Wilson on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
I thought of a potentially useful way of putting a number to technology outages. Calculate how much you spend to educate each child in your district per hour. My back of the envelope calculation came out at $6. Use that figure to calculate a “learning opportunity cost” (my term) for each tech problem. Let’s say you had a problem in your computer lab that kept students out of there for three hours. At 25 students/class that would be an LOC of
3 × 25 × $6 = $450
By Michael Gras on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
The Web site listed is where several local districts are building a project with the help of a foundation.
I’m the tech coordinator for White Oak ISD here in Texas. I see a lot of value in you thought process but struggle with direction of corporate comparisons. There is definite value in knowing the costs incurred, my budget allows for “a back of the envelope calculation “of around $185 per student per year. I probably need to look at this again but we are roughly funded to replace computers alone, forget servers, switches and hubs on an 11-year cycle. Yes I said hubs, the last hub left in the district now is in my office and I need it. Could you imagine teaching a child on an 11-year-old computer? Now before this sounds too depressing, I should say that no child in my district is on a computer older than 6 years except for limited circumstances where a teacher finds value in the programs it can run. And every student has regular access to computers less than 3 years old (I’ll not talk about the servers). The first year I was at White Oak, I was able to replace 40 of the oldest computers with a single grant. I carefully selected the computers in the worst shape, usually the oldest, and replaced them with new machines days before the start of school. I promise you that less than half of them made it to the dumpster. Teachers were dragging them back into classes and admonishing me. as they still had value. I now only replace a computer if it is down or the budget or a grant allows for it. Six years ago my network traffic was hardly measurable mostly broadcasts. Now it is nearing 30%. Thanks to the Texas Education Agency, Southwestern Bell (now AT&T), and even some generous Cisco Representatives, I was able to secure $128,000 in new Cisco equipment and another $100,000 to train and build a community network. My new routers go in this Thanksgiving because my partner in crime here is also willing to work during the holiday. Maybe part of the reason we have lots of last minuet repairs and overdue work orders is because we are so busy funding our operation. I visit regularly with surrounding districts and engage in many cooperative projects that take me away from my duties. According to an area network auditor ours is one of the best running around among independent school districts in East Texas. IT people in school districts of small size have to spend time under different hats. I readily admit it hurts efficiency but I guess when I wear a different hat I’m not really an IT guy and the IT guy is missing in action. Sometimes walking away gives me a better network some times it does not. It most always leaves people hanging. Hope you see my struggle now. There are many tiny districts around here that may be loosing the battle. I hope you keep the tips and thoughts coming, I bet you can help me be a better IT guy when I am wearing that hat. Please keep sharing what you plan to do. It will not fall on deaf ears. Tell us some about your district and the changes you plan.
By John Pederson on Sep 14, 2006 | Reply
Reminds me of that common exercise in education where you are asked to think about one of your best teachers/learning experiences in your past. After all is done, the common element is how you were treated, not what you learned.
Metrics are extremely important. At the end of the day, you’ll be measured less on statistics and more on “other” in the eyes of many. Makes me think about Malcom Gladwell’s “Blink”.
Go look at enGauge. It’s a nice mix of both.
By Tim Wilson on Sep 15, 2006 | Reply
I led the enGauge project at Hopkins a couple years ago. It did provide excellent baseline information. Unfortunately there was little follow-up and I don’t think it did much good in the end.
By Paul Shoesmith on Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
You asked: “I continue to wonder how best to map these IT service management concepts from the corporate culture to the work I do in a school district.” In the UK we at Becta (the government agency which supports all four UK education departments in their strategic ICT developments) have been through this process with the ITIL resources and produced the Becta Framework for ICT Support (FITS) which takes the ITIL processes but translates them to a (UK) school context. We’re seeing increasing take up over here - it would be interesting to hear whether you feel these have value in the US? All of the documentation is available from the website if you’re interested.
By Tim Wilson on Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
Paul, thanks for the link. I’ll definitely check that out!
By Paul Shoesmith on Sep 16, 2006 | Reply
No problem! Sorry about the dodgy Saturday morning HTML code in my post but I think the link works OK!
By Paul Stonier on Sep 19, 2006 | Reply
My colleague Paul Shoesmith at Becta directed me to this interesting discussion. I have lead the FITS (Framework for ICT Technical Support) project since its conception in 2002 and authored much of the advisory materials. FITS is adapted from ITIL and scaled appropriately for a school environment. It is much more prescriptive than ITIL and contains implementation guides, operations guides and tools you can use to collect information.
We are currently undertaking a programme of work to develop three seperate frameworks of advice to help different types of education institutions implement FITS. One for schools that contract out much of their ICT service delivery and support (Primary FITS), one for schools that have an internal support team (FITS second edition) and one for larger colleges that are looking to use an integrated service mamagement tool (FOTS for FE). These will be available later this year.
Also, on the Becta website we have an operations management framework (FITS OM) which is adapted from industry and education best practice. FITS OM covers functions such as Storage Management and Security Administration. You can access FITS OM at http://becta.org.uk/fits_om.