OVERVIEW OF ITIL AT CISCO TRANSCRIPT

Technology Tutorials OVERVIEW OF ITIL AT CISCO TRANSCRIPT Program and Presenter Opening Ian Reddy: Hello, and welcome to the Technology Tutorial Video Series in which we cover what Cisco IT has learned from some of it s key internal solution deployments, processes, and frameworks. I m Ian Reddy, and I m an IT manager, and with me today is David Lietzell, an IT program manager. This video summarizes real-world IT experience of ITIL in the global enterprise. And now, welcome inside Cisco IT. Agenda Today s agenda includes a history of ITIL at Cisco, the current size and scope of the use of ITIL at Cisco, why we re using ITIL and what we ve found useful in the use of ITIL at Cisco, success stories, some of our lessons learned, and current works in progress, leading to the future of ITIL at Cisco. History of ITIL at Cisco First, the history of ITIL at Cisco. ITIL s been in use informally at Cisco for well over a decade. However, in 2003, we first started discovering through executive customer engagements and briefings that the industry in general of enterprise IT was having an increased interest in ITIL. All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 10

Size and Scope of ITIL at Cisco In 2004, internally, we did our first formal adoption of ITIL as a processed framework in order to improve our internal IT processes. Also in 2003, a released-management organization was formed to take the massive amounts of changes being delivered into the IT operational environment, and collect those into organized releases on a quarterly basis within Cisco. In 2004, again, an excellence in operations initiative was formed. Cisco was starting to discover that a focused attention on metrics and process improvement could bring about more stable, more competitive IT service environment. In 2003, we gained momentum. We began formal ITIL training planning and certifications. A key partner with us in this was the IT learning group inside Cisco. They helped us establish global ITIL training courses offered internally to Cisco around the world. In 2006, the IT operating model is established. The IT operating model discusses what IT should be doing, and since then, we found that ITIL becomes every increasingly useful to describe how we should do those things. In 2007, an ITIL processed-based organizational plan and roadmap was established, in which we began to create a structure for the use of IT globally within Cisco, and leading to finally in 2008 a formal IT-wide service management strategy. Now, along the way, ITIL V2 became ITIL V3 in 2007. And that shift from ITIL V2 to V3 was key in allowing us to implement this processbased organization-wide planning and start working on a service management strategy. So, what s the size and scope of ITIL like at Cisco today? Well, from that training, over 1,400 people inside Cisco have taken ITIL training either the ITIL awareness introductory course, a foundations course, or higher-level certifications, either as a service manager, or as a practitioner in a specific area, such as change and configuration management, or incident and problem management. A thousand people have ITIL certifications, that is, an ITIL foundational level certification or higher. In fact, in global operations, in about 2005, we made it mandatory for everybody in the organization to at least have ITIL foundation certification. And as well, we maintain at least a halfdozen or more people who are fully ITIL service manager certified. They are used to help coach and influence the rest of the IT community within Cisco, in order to better adopt and manage the processes and the services that the processes support. Where are we today with ITIL processes? We have ten of them, either adopted or in progress, at varying levels of maturity. For example, incident management is one of our oldest processes. It s been formally established using command centers, even monitoring and incident response and recovery for over ten years at Cisco. Problem management and change management have also been around for several years. The release management function, which I described, is a few years old, as is service continuity and, of course, internally we have an IT service desk or help desk. Service catalog, service portfolio and financial management of services are currently under development and due for release within the next fiscal year. All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 10

ITIL Based Functions at Cisco Finally, the service manager job profile has been released inside Cisco. This profile is key in that people within IT all have job descriptions. However, the profile allows them to also have careers. In this case, service manager or service lead job profile as a title for a person allows them to develop specific skills and proficiencies for a career in managing services within Cisco, and ultimately, possibly managing services to Cisco s customers. It focuses on the end-to-end client experience and relationships and improves the relationship between IT overall and the business functions within Cisco. Sometimes I m asked, How is the ITIL information being shared between groups and individuals at Cisco? Using many of the current technologies, collaboration technology such as wikis and forums and online collaboration capabilities such as WebEx Connect, people are rapidly exchanging best practices, asking each other questions about, how do you do it, and what have you learned, and converging upon a set of best practices through these working groups, that the whole community of service managers and service leads can share with each other and use to improve their services for the benefit of Cisco s business functions. So, what are the ITIL-based functions at Cisco? An example of some of them already using the best practices of ITIL are IT global operations. I m a manager in IT global operations. We manage today incident management, problem management, change management, and configuration management, with plans for some of the other processes I just described. IT global operations delivers the single processes for all of Cisco IT globally. There are only one version of incident management, for example. There are one pair of command centers, follow the sun world wide, that look for all IT incidents and manage the recovery of those incidents. There s one change management process. Thousands of changes are proposed, reviewed, and approved worldwide throughout IT and managed through the change management process within IT global operations. There s an IT help desk. Internally, we call that the global technical response center. The IT help desk handles all IT-related requests for help, or for provisioning or services, within Cisco. The Cisco remote operation service, or CROS as it s commonly called, is a customer-facing capability that embodies many of the ITIL practices and procedures to the benefit of Cisco s customers. There s an IT service continuity management function, which performs the assessments on criticality and recovery requirements, or the continuity requirements, of all the IT services that are delivered by Cisco IT. Defense services is a function within our customer services group that interacts with customers and delivers professional services to allow our customers to improve their own capabilities and for their solutions and services management. There s the enterprise release management office, which I described earlier, handling the bundles of changes into large releases hundreds or thousands of changes bundled together into quarterly releases within Cisco. All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 10

IT Operating Model ITIL V3 Alignment What Does ITIL Do for Cisco? These are just a few of the functions within Cisco that are following ITIL best practices; there are many more. So, ITIL it building momentum at Cisco. The groups and individuals in both Cisco s business functions and IT are learning about ITIL and sharing information as I described. Now, a word about the IT operating model and how ITIL V3 is supporting the evolution of Cisco IT. The IT operating model in Cisco is a description of what IT does. It shows in a cyclic fashion the vision and strategies that are formed at the between IT and the business, and how those come through architecture, planning, and released development and implementation functions in order to deliver a service into production at Cisco. The IT operations and support functions are there to ensure that all the critical issues and learnings out of that production environment are being fed back into future generations of architecture, planning, and development. ITIL V3 has a very similar structure. And again, when ITIL V3 was released in 2007, it immediately became relevant and useful to improving our operating model approach. Again, the operating model s a lot like the - the what IT does, and V3 is helping in helping us define the how that we should do those things. We are unlikely to rapidly, let s say in the next year, take all of ITIL V3, after all, there are over two dozen processes there, but we will selectively use ITIL V3 to add to our operating model and the practices, thinking, and behavior of IT to improve ourself in a strategic fashion over the coming years. We believe that ITIL V3 and its strategic, integrated-process approach gives us a lot of bandwidth to put in improvements in the operating model that should last us, or stand us in good stead, for a decade or more. So, what does ITIL do for Cisco? It gives us robust processes. It gives us an industry standard definition as a good starting point, a foundational starting point, that we can take and look at and apply judiciously to our own situation. It offers an integrated approach; V3 connects processes together. That s a vast improvement over ITIL V2. V2 had basically ten processes, whereas V3 has far more. But V3 also describes how those processes feed into each other, and how they form a life cycle for the service management approach for IT. It s a framework that allows efficient delivery of services. It offers sustainable service management. And that strategic approach allows us to generate key metrics, key performance indicators around both the processes and the success of our services that we deliver, and plan for future improvements and incorporate those into the roadmaps that the business and IT have negotiated for future service capabilities. It improves the user experience. ITIL has a fundamental premise that the focus is on the client or the customer, and that s no different at Cisco. It allows us to make sure that the relationship is consistently there; that we have a recognized people who are accountable and responsible for an ongoing dialogue with our business partners; and also at this time is allowing us to address service-based costing, the ability to take a service, better define with the business what the expected adoption and utilization of that service is, plan for those kind of future outcomes, size the service appropriately, and make sure we re managing the costs either with our own vendors or service providers, All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 4 of 10

What does ITIL Do for Employees? Cisco ITIL Success Story with our own staff, and with our own datacenters to optimize the size and quality of the service according to the business needs. What does ITIL do for the employees in Cisco IT? Well, it fundamentally allows them to develop their knowledge and skills. ITIL courses, of course, are a knowledge base and readily available globally. So, Cisco IT staff find themselves easily able to take the ITIL foundations class, practitioner class, or even become an IT service management expert. The common language that s offered by ITIL is extremely useful. Now, compared to years ago, when we talk about incident management or problem management, people know the difference. They realize that an incident is something that leads to a problem and the need for root cause and long-term fix, and that worrying about root cause and longterm fix may not be appropriate during an incident, when the focus is on recovering a service. Those are examples of how that both the terms and definitions of ITIL are extremely useful to get everybody in IT on the same page, so to speak, when they re talking with each other. A point on taxonomy: Taxonomy is the mapping of that language into how it s used not just what it means. And that s very important in that it allows the technologists in IT, who are building the service management tools that we will use, to map out what are called data models. In other words, to when we talk about an incident or a problem to capture the right data behind the scenes and make sure that during an incident or a problem we re seeing the right data to make better decisions. So, it reduces communications frustrations and allows us to build better tools that support our processes and the people behaviors that we wish to achieve. It supports certifications and career growth. Having formal ITIL certifications for somebody who is a career-minded service manager is very important, as it would be for any other career. And service management and process approach is proactive, and it helps prevent reactive fire fighting. Having people think about the implications of the life cycle. Whether they re performing architecture, or they re writing code, or they re performing a change in a production environment, that life cycle allows some forethought to occur and to think about the other roles and responsibilities that are involved in that life cycle. So, Cisco finds ITIL to be a success story for our use in Cisco IT. Global IT operations has been an advocate of ITIL for many years, and it s become something that now is generally used and accepted from the CIO level, all the way through to the individual contributors in Cisco IT. In the past, we were often reactive, and we found that improvements came mostly as a result of operational learnings. We would end up sometimes in fire fights in an effort to fix things, not quite sure who was doing what. What we find now is that we re far more planned, that we have a process-based strategic approach to incidents, problems, change, service continuity, etc. Moreover, these days, we have measures, and thus, measurable plans and results. We know better when we succeed, and not just when we fail. In the future, we wish to get to more proactive improvements, be able to do better trending and predictive analysis of where services are going and where the service management processes need to improve in All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 5 of 10

Excellence in Operations (EIO) Initiative History support of that. So, we expect to mature our capabilities and processes as we go forward. David Lietzell: Thank you, Ian, for that over overview of ITIL at Cisco. Hi, my name is David Lietzell, and I m going to give you an overview of a program called excellence in operations in IT. This program started the latter part of 2004, during some of our yearend close processes that we had issues with that we didn t think were acceptable long term we really wanted to address. We identified six functional areas for further analysis in problem management, incident management, change management, configuration, business mapping in terms of looking at the effect of a particular component in IT on the business process that it affected, and production scheduling control of our batch jobs. Methodology for Problem Management Improvements Specific Steps for Problem Management Specific Steps for Incident Management The methodology that we chose was DMAIC, a very data-based, analysis-driven approach to look at the problems and find the root cause. When we looked into the issues that we were having, we discovered that the root-cause analysis that one would typically do after an issue to find out what really was the source of the problem and how to fix it from happening again really wasn t happening. A lot of the environment that we were in was very fast paced, and discovered that folks were busy addressing the incident once the service was backed up, there were lots of other things to do, and never really got back to doing the root-cause analysis. So, we undertook a program to really change that mindset towards rootcause analysis and put training in place to allow people to do a better job of that. The specific steps that we did for problem management was to create some training modules and require that every group take the training to really learn what root cause involves, how to do it, and make sure that you indeed got to the end result and the actual root cause of the problem. Accountability metrics for doing that work was a key part of that. And generating those accountability metrics, publishing those metrics, and really looking for improvement in those metrics was very, very key to getting that improvement in place. For incident management, similarly, the response to the particular incident, particularly the high-severity incidents, was focused on to really address an SLA we had of a two-hour recover time. Targeted communication to the groups that were impacted by that was also key to that improvement area. EIO Results and Achievements Overall, the efforts that we did in root-cause analysis were able to reduce the frequency and duration of our high-impacting incidents, what we call our P1, P2s. We reduced our root cause defective rate significantly. Our batch job failure rate went down. We started a database of mapping applications and IT components to business processes, a very long process that is still underway today, and begun All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 6 of 10

EIO Business Impacting Timeline Key EIO Operational Metrics the advocacy of a real change management database so we could have that in place for all of the components and can assess proposed changes much better than we did before. Key to all this really were the accountability metrics. They were generated at a director level and a VP level and reviewed at each quarter to see the progress that was being made in the root-cause analysis. So, this slide shows the real business impacting of the work that we did. Along the vertical axis, you see the incident volume and a timeline across the bottom. The little numbered events there in the text that s shown on the slide, you may need to download this slide to read all the text that s in there, but it shows the process that we went through. And as you can see, initially when we started establishing the standard for doing root-cause analysis, we had some pushback. People often said, I m too busy, I don t have time for this. I have other things to do, and it would seem like additional work that they had to do. And indeed, the results weren t immediately apparent. As you can see, the baseline of our incident volume went up. As we finally got people to really put the effort forward, eventually that began to come down, and we got good results. And as more and more groups saw that success, we used that success in some of the other groups that were still struggling, as it went further on down in that area. Key to that downward slide was the upper management s support of the metrics and the visibility we gave to the metrics at the Q end ops review, where we really looked at the progress within each group. So, the incident volume, as you can see, dropped about 30 percent over the years that we ve seen. In the upper right-hand corner, you ve got some metrics that talk about the business impacting hours of the incident, the total duration of all of them, and that dropped significantly, too, as you can see over the years. Now, one of the things that we do get asked a lot is, So, you talk a lot about metrics; what are some of the key metrics that you collect as part of EIO? This next slide here shows the six key metrics that we really produce and we review with the CIO at each quarter. You can see the frequency, the duration, the average duration of incidents. The lower left corner shows the defective root-cause rate. So, that s the root causes that were not done. So, that s a value that we re pushing down quite a bit. The incidents caused by changes is a very difficult metric, and we re still struggling in some ways to make sure we have an accurate measurement of that. So, that one is still moving around a little bit. The production data fixes on the right you can see moving as well. But the key metrics on this slide, in my mind, is the success we ve had in really doing root cause and pushing that metric down, and that being reflected in the reduced incident and duration of incidents that we have. Now, from an ITIL perspective, doing root cause is really only half the battle. You must continue and implement the long-term fix, and then really what you get is the reduction in the recurring outages. All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 7 of 10

So, right now, we re in a process of moving that focus on root-cause analysis, which we think we ve done a good job of getting to a nice, low level, and moving to make sure we indeed now are implementing the long-term fixes suggested from that analysis. And then ultimately, we ll be measuring the recurring outages, making sure those are indeed reducing. Lessons Learned IT Projects and Programs in Progress So, some of the lessons learned in applying these changes is you ve really got to address the cultural change of taking on new activities, new training you want people to do. And you ve gotta understand the culture that they re in and the issues why it may not be occurring. When we first started the analysis and talking to people about why we weren t able to do root-cause analysis, the comments that came back was, Well, no one seems to care about that. I ve got a lot of things to do, and there doesn t seem to be any benefit for that. Further, I m not sure I know how to do that. So, in the training modules that we put together, the accountability metrics that we had, we really tried to come with an attitude of not that people weren t doing their job, but what was there in the culture that kept them from doing that and giving the tools and the learning to be able to be successful at it. And as they were successful at it, we really took those groups and highlighted them, and showed them to others, and used them as ambassadors to others to instill the benefit of doing this long term. Cause as you can recall back to the previous slide, initially, you don t see the results right away. You have to stay at it for a little while, and then the results come. So, that was the efforts that we did, in excellence in operations we continue to do, and now I ll turn it back to Ian. Ian Reddy: Thank you, David, for that coverage of excellence in operations at Cisco IT. Now, let s have a look at the work in progress leading to the future of ITIL at Cisco. First, we have configuration management. An integrated configuration management program is taking many of our legacy data repositories and capabilities and working towards putting them together into a federated configuration management system. In conjunction with that, we have a growing operational configuration management capability, where we re looking at the data validation or the configuration librarianship function specified by ITIL. We also have a service catalog and portfolio program. The service catalog framework is extremely important to better represent Cisco IT s service offerings to the business functions and the client base at Cisco. In the process of doing that, it s leading to better definition and governance of what services we offer, what services are being constructed, and when to end-of-life services to help free up resources and datacenter space for new offerings and capabilities to the business. Service level management is just getting off the ground. The process is being developed. It will connect strongly with a client experience of IT capability that s well under way to improve the client experience of Cisco IT. And the financial management of services, the ability to take the pipelines that make up the service deliveries to the business and cost All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 8 of 10

Service Management Strategy Q&A Further Cisco on Cisco Information each segment of the pipeline, right size those segments, and allow us to better express to the business what the funding or the budget of IT is being spent on, and how the business benefits from that spend. Perhaps the most important capability or program that we have in place today is a service management strategy. This takes the people of IT, the process that are used to manage IT internally, and the services that IT offers, and the technology, and makes sure that we re moving all three of those elements forward synchronously in lock step with each other, so that we don t end up with too much manual effort not being supported by technology, or process being managed, but people without the skills to go and adhere to those processes effectively, and then make sure that the right data, tools, and skills are in place at the right time in order to improve overall the experience of being a staff member inside Cisco IT, and being an employ or a vendor or a partner interacting with Cisco IT. One of the questions that s often asked is, What was or is the most challenging aspect of inserting ITIL into a corporate culture, especially an enterprise size IT shop at Cisco? Well, in my experience, one of the things we ve found is that you have to get buy-in at all levels. The real challenge is that if you focus on just one segment of the IT population, say the people who are working on architecture, or just the people who are working on projects, and they don t have a comprehensive understanding of the whole life cycle of service management that ITIL prescribes, then you end up with segmented advances in their approaches, but not a holistic improvement overall. People find still find segments of that pipeline that I described. One segment may be improved, but the overall experience and benefit to the business is not improved because the rest of the pipeline is not operating effectively. Also, some are asked, What steps are being made to increase ITIL adoption in Cisco? I think we re fortunate in that the early planning around the training and the foundations training and the service manager training for ITIL at Cisco has gotten a large percentage of our population understanding the processes. So, they have a knowledge base. And now we re focused on turning that into skill and experience. So, perhaps the most important aspect of increasing ITIL adoption is that we ve gone somewhat beyond that in many ways to start looking at service management, the actual practices and behaviors. That increases the pull for further ITIL interest and further people to take the training and adopt the practices and behaviors of ITIL at Cisco. To learn more, visit cisco.com/go/ciscoit. This Web site gives you access to more than 100 case studies and operational best practices on Cisco IT deployments. All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 9 of 10

Thank you for Watching David and I would like to thank you for your time today. Printed in USA C78-331727-01 10/06 All contents are Copyright 1992 2006 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 10 of 10