Westfield seeking ITIL glory
Westfield seeking ITIL glory
May 9, 2008: The largest shopping mall owner in theworld has been busy aligning its ITdepartment with the business in an attempt to improve the delivery of IT services—and taken aboard the ITIL framework to successfully navigate the journey.
Westfield, Australia’s largest corporation, went with the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) concept to chase a more business aligned IT strategy. With a dual role of managing shops and being an asset manager, Westfield saw the clear benefits in adopting ITIL.
Gail Bryant, IT services manager at Westfield says the company had a paper based change control procedure when she arrived on the scene and you were lucky to see one document regarding change to land on your desk each month. “Westfield had previously operated on the idea that if it aint broke, don’t fix it,” Bryant said in an address to the CA Expo in Sydney.
Bryant and her team sought to change this mentality while also making the upper tiers of management realise that IT could actually contribute to revenue rather than just being treated as an increasing cost.
“We’ve adopted ITIL and have been able to use it as a framework,” says Bryant.
Making these changes also saw the workforce adapt to new policies with a dedicated support manager who was focused on change management and the goal of constantly finding new ways to do things. “If you’re in IT today you need to be able to talk to the customer,” Bryant says. “Because of this the whole people picture was drastically changed for the better.”
There was also a major overhaul of the physical equipment involved in the project, which meant delving into the depths of the Westfield data centres and improving as much as possible.
“We had prehistoric servers, every time we wanted to replace something in the air-conditioning system we had to turn our entire data centre off,” says Bryant.
The next step in the ITIL process was bringing the service desk up to speed with incident and problem management as well as implementing a self-service system. This change control method saw incidents reduced by 40% and customer satisfaction with incident resolution jump to more than 80% in 2007.
According to Bryant, the biggest victory was seeing the mindset change within the business as the project started to show positive results: “There was a big change in how we work— management used to yell at IT to fix something fast—now they yell at us to make sure we follow quality process and ensure we don’t rush it,” she says.
But from the outset, Bryant says Westfield’s success can only be attributed to understanding the needs of the business before adopting a framework. – Nathan Statz