Proving ground

In this month's case study, we look at a struggling it department and ask how it can secure its future by redeeming its image within its company

Raul Fernandez's friends thought he was mad when he packed in his job in Seville to move to Ireland in 1998, after he had met a woman from Clare while she was on holiday in Spain.

But the gamble soon paid off. Raul got a permanent job with a good salary in Shannon, as a database administrator in the IT department of a major international insurance company. Love also blossomed. He married Jennifer O'Sullivan in 2001 and they bought a house outside Ennis.

Raul excelled at his IT work. In April 2007, after two internal promotions, Raul was made data centre manager. His employer, EF Insurance, is a major worldwide insurance company with a considerable presence and large IT infrastructure in Ireland. The data centre reports to the Irish headquarters in Dublin, which in turn is answerable to Group headquarters in Zurich.

Raul knew that management on the business side in Dublin had reservations about the performance of the data centre.

He had learnt this through some fraught conversations he'd had with different business unit managers over the years and the abrupt way in which his predecessor had left. But Raul's teams were so busy managing day-to-day events and coping with unplanned work, they rarely had any time for strategic improvement projects.

Unknown to Raul, however, the Dublin management had asked Group Internal Audit to review the Irish data centre's operations, with a view to moving the entire data centre to Zurich.

From Dublin's perspective, things weren't working out in Shannon. There appeared to be low system availability and lax security; there were daily issues with applications and systems, and the data centre management seemed to have little appreciation of the day-to-day needs of the rest of the business.

In general, there was a view that the data centre was neither cost effective nor providing a high quality service. It was often seen as the cause of other staff twiddling their thumbs as they waited for a system to be brought back online after some technical issue.

One month after his appointment as manager, Raul headed off to his first global EF Insurance conference in Switzerland.

Raul had a free evening before the event started the next day and he arranged to meet fellow Spaniard Juan Gonzalez, who worked in IT in the company's Zurich office and with whom he had become friendly. However it wasn't the relaxed chat over dinner that Raul had expected.

They had hardly sat down in the restaurant when Juan told Raul that he had heard that Group headquarters had received complaints from the Dublin office about system reliability and availability in the data centre in Shannon. The option to consolidate the Shannon operation into the Zurich data centre was being considered, Juan said.

Raul was shocked. He knew there were problems in Shannon, some of them with far-reaching repercussions, but what IT department didn't have its crisis moments? Anyway, most of the issues had arisen before he became manager. Moving the centre's work to Zurich was not what Raul needed, on a professional or personal level.

As he walked back to his hotel, all the major issues that the IT team in Shannon had ever had to deal with started to flood Raul's brain.

In the nine years since he joined EF Insurance, there had been three high-profile cases of downtime due to virus infestation.

There was the eternally half-completed project to set up an automated server patching system; the monthly reports, regularly requested by business management, which were never compiled; the frequent confrontations with business management due to downtime caused by failed patching and upgrades.

Topping all that was the major issue which had ultimately led to his predecessor's departure: the updating project, completed in February, which hadn't delivered what the business side had expected.

The only comfort for Raul as he tried to get to sleep was Juan's parting information that the internal audit team was not due to visit for six months. That gave Raul six months before his future would be decided. He had worked too hard to get where he was; he was determined to show that the data centre should stay in Shannon.

Raul knew that the teams he managed in Shannon were very good at the technology. That had to be his biggest asset in making the case to ensure his future in Shannon. Or was it?

Maybe that was part of the problem. Raul was an IT person, now in a management role, and maybe the real issue was problem definition rather than problem fixing. His teams were great at fixing problems but perhaps, he thought, they were good at creating them in the first place. His mind was riddled with doubt. He needed good advice, fast.

The next day Raul attended various presentations and workshops. One of the managers from Canada, Jim Young, caught his attention. Jim had spoken about IT and business alignment, using simple language.

Raul approached Jim in the bar that evening, outlined his situation and asked for advice. Jim was an enigmatic sort of character, especially after a few beers.

"It sounds like you have inherited a team which confuses hard work with efficiency," said Jim casually. "Do the insurance salespeople get paid their commission based on their own estimates of how successful they are? If they do, I want a job in that department." Raul was perplexed: "What has this got to do with the data centre?"

"Look here, Raul," Jim said, "if you don't measure what you do, you can't manage it. If you can't manage it, not only will you never improve but you'll never even know what you're doing wrong.

"Whether you've admitted it to yourself or not, surely you must know why the data centre irritates the business side?"

Raul just wanted answers: "Jim, why don't you just tell me what I should do?"

"That's simple," said Jim, "you have to prove to the business side that you run an efficient department and that no other team could run the data centre as well as you."

"Come on, don't patronise me," said Raul.

"Seriously," said Jim, "from the brief information you've given me, your data centre has, at the very least, issues with security, management and project development.

"Identify the problems in these areas, fix them, and then prove you've fixed them to the Dublin management, or to Group Internal Audit in Zurich, or whoever ends up making a decision on your future.

"Now, if you don't mind," Jim added, "I'm going to look for some friends in the lobby. Good luck."

Raul was left nursing his whiskey, with a lot of questions and few answers.