Alternative

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ITIL and SLM The Buried Treasure to Customer
Satisfaction for The Convergence Technology
Council
Peggy Gerace-Roosa Director, Operations
Communication and Reporting May 18, 2006
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About EarthLink

• 10-year-old company after successful merger of
  equals in 2001 between EarthLink and MindSpring
• Annual Revenue 1,400,000,000.00 (1.4B)
• Number of Employees 2,000
• Number of Customers 5.4 million (as of Dec.
  2004)
• Subscriber Growth Attributed to
• Acquisitions
• Channel sales
• Reseller partnerships
• Organic (walk-ins)

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• 5.4M Customers
• 4M Dialup (Premium 3.5M, Value 500K)
• 1.2M Broadband (Cable, xDSL)
• 160K Web Hosting (Unix, Windows)
• 50K Wireless (Blackberry, PDA, Laptops, Wi-Fi)
• Dial Access Coverage gt 90 of US Population
• 16K Local Dial Access Numbers
• 500K Active Modem Ports (50 ELNK, 50
  Outsourced)
• 250 PoPs (18 Core Backbone PoPs, four data
  centers)

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Goals for Tonight

• Brief Introduction to ITIL
• More info on the areas implemented
• SLM and Incident Management as Cornerstone to
  ITIL Implementation Efforts
• Environment Before and After
• Major Changes
• Benefits
• Wet Your Appetite for MORE

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First Goal

• Brief Introduction to ITIL

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Quick Story Achieving Quality
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Were the Folks Who Stop the Plane from Moving!

• Break through walls- Establish processes to
  achieve quality- Establish and report on
  quality metrics

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What Is ITIL?

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library
• Comprehensive library of best practices for
  planning, deploying, and supporting IT services
• De-facto global standard in Service Management
• ITIL describes the WHAT, not the HOW of
  implementing service management
• A well-known, proven framework that will
  accommodate the addition of more processes as
  they became ready

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Service Support vs. Service Delivery

• Total of 12 ITIL Process Areas, broken into 2
  distinct categories
• Service Delivery
• Service Level Management
• Capacity Management
• Service Continuity Management (related to
  Disaster Recovery)
• Availability Management
• Financial Management

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Service Support vs. Service Delivery

• Service Support
• Configuration Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Service/Help Desk
• Security Management
• Change Management
• Release Management

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Key Elements of ITIL Framework
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Change Management
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Change Management

• To manage the process for requesting, assessing,
  authorizing and implementing changes to the
  Earthlink production environment
• To ensure that no unauthorized changes are
  implemented
• To minimize the risks involved with new product
  and service releases
• To minimize disruption caused by changes
• To ensure that changes are properly researched
  and that all relevant parties have input into the
  assessment of changes
• To coordinate the effort involved in building,
  testing and implementing changes

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Release Management
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Release Management

• Minimize unplanned downtime through high-quality
  products and services
• Minimize planned downtime by improving the
  reliability, availability, and maintainability of
  products and services
• Use metrics to track and diagnose issues,
  creating a mindset of continuous improvement
• Avoid Re-work by implementing end-to-end
  processes that minimize the production cycle and
  improve costs

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Service Level Management
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Service Level Management

• Work with internal and external customers to
  established agreed upon service levels
• Provide reporting to monitor success
• Maintain and improve IT Service quality
• Constant cycle of monitoring and reporting upon
  IT Service achievements
• Oversee actions to eradicate poor service in
  line with business or cost justification
• Achieve a better working relationship between
  Operations and core business units
• Establishing clear and regular communication on
  service quality

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Incident Management
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Incident Management

• Establish processes and procedures to restore
  normal service operation as quickly as possible
  and minimise the adverse impact on business
  operations
• Establish clear and documented escalation
  procedures and tools which will allow for
  reliable management of service events giving
  priority to the most critical issues
• Establish procedures to ensure service events are
  escalated within the agreed upon SLAs, have
  established accountability, and problem ownership

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Second Goal

• SLM and Incident Management as Cornerstone to
  ITIL Implementation Efforts
• Environment Before and After
• Major Changes
• Benefits

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Background ELNK Operations
Operations
Net Eng Network Planning Network Design Line
Capacity
MIS/CIO Financial Systems Billing Invoicing F
ulfillment Internal Tools Solution Center
Network Data Center Ops NOC Data
Center Mgmt Production Security Fraud
Abuse SLM Process Mgmt
System Admin External Customer Facing Systems
System Capacity Planning
CTO Office Architecture Technology Standards

Product Dev New Products Existing Products Co
rporate Project Mgmt
QE Quality Control
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Rational for SLM and PIP Efforts

• Operations Environment Before SLM
• Supported both internal-facing and
  customer-facing systems
• 57 independent departments handled varying
  degrees of break/fix issues
• Close to 100 ticketing systems
• Two escalation points NOC and Solutions Center

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Rational for SLM and PIP Efforts cont
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Before SLMSupport Channels and Resolution Paths
Multiple Support Channels
Phone Calls
Walkups
3rd Party Vendors
Individual Developers
Product Teams
Solutions Center
NOC
Multiple Resolution Paths
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After SLM Support Channels and Resolution Paths
Fewer Support Channels
Web Remedy
Monitoring Systems
Email
Customer calls 21111
Solutions Center
NOC
Streamlined Resolution Paths
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Before SLMBreak/Fix Resolution Paths
Individual Developers
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After SLMBreak/Fix Resolution Path
Tier 1
Solutions Center
NOC
Tier 1 resolves SE or escalates it to T2 -
updates Remedy
Tier 2
Escalation Sends Alert
Tier 2 receives alert on wireless device and
accepts the SE
Tier 2 resolves SE or escalates it to T3 and
updates Remedy
Tier 3
Escalation Sends Alert
Tier 3 resolves SE and updates Remedy
Tier 3 receives alert on wireless device and
accepts the SE
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SoWhat Changed?

• Remedy Revamped
• Improved Web Remedy stability
• Redesigned interface
• Updated online help
• Processes Reworked
• New severity codes
• Formal tier structure
• Pager usage
• On-call scheduling

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Major Changes Severity Codes

• Each Severity has Responsiveness Rules
• Dictates responsiveness to customer
• Ex Respond within 15 min. for S1 service event
• Each Severity has Escalation Rules
• Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Each Severity has Notification Rules
• Ensures executives, management, technicians, and
  customers are consistently notified at
  appropriate times
• Each Severity has Resolution Rules
• Ex Resolve S1 service events within 90 minutes
  (fixed)
• Each Severity has an associated Service Clock
• Ex S1 Service Clock runs 24 x 7

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Major Changes Tiers

• Tier 1
• NOC, Abuse, and Solutions Center staff who
  receive customer requests for service,
  information, or problem resolution
• Tier 2
• EarthLink Operations staff with a higher level of
  technical or functional expertise in specific
  areas
• They provide information or solutions that Tier 1
  is unable to provide
• Tier 3
• EarthLink Operations staff with the highest level
  of technical or functional expertise in specific
  areas
• They provide information or solutions that Tier
  2 is unable to provide
• The final service event resolution owners

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Major Changes RIM Pager Usage

• RIM (bi-directional email devices) are required
  for Tier 2 and Tier 3 technicians, managers and
  sr. managers responsible for break/fix
• Personnel required to add their pager information
  into Remedy
• Initial pager purchase and setup costs paid from
  Operations account set up specifically for SLM

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Major Changes On-Call Support Matrix

• Automated service event assignment to on-call
  support staff
• Managers receive weekly Monday email identifying
  who theyve listed on call for the coming week
• On-call schedule updated as needed
• No more searching for whos on call!

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Major Changes On-Call Support Matrix
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Major Changes SLM Reporting

• Establishing key performance measurements
• for service metric reporting compliance,
• including
• Response rate by severity code (goal is to meet
  80)
• Resolution rate by severity code (goal is to meet
  80)
• Call handle rate (abandon rate)
• Average call answer time
• Email response rate
• First contact resolution (FCR) rate
• Root Problem/Identification/Elimination
• Customer Satisfaction
• Surveys
• Reopened Service Events

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Major Changes Reporting and Metrics
Departmental/Divisional Reports Dashboards
Remedy System
Trending Process Variance Reporting
Operations-wide Review
Individual Employee Review
Root Cause Analysis
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Results
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Benefits

• Accurate and consistent metrics measuring the
  impact of changes to the production environment
  has resulted in continuous and sustained process
  improvement
• Note of caution What you dont measure is as
  important as what you do measure. Both drive
  behavior
• The culture at EarthLink is slowly changing to
  one of service orientation from IT versus
  everyone else
• Process improvement ha been a valuable tool to
  help in breaking down silos and networks of this
  is how weve always done it
• Ability to spot and analyze trends over time
• Build business cases for process, tool, and
  staffing modifications
• Eventually reduces time required to remediate
  break/fix issues

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Final Goal

• Wet Your Appetite for MORE!

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Operations Baseline
Total Service Events for Baseline 47,817 or
avg. 15,939/ month Reduced by 15 in first 2
years
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Average Response and Resolution
Ops Response 79 Resolution 70
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Responsiveness by Group
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S1 Total Fix Time MIS
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Top 10 Events Categories
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Customer Satisfaction
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Call Volume Metrics Solutions Center
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Dashboards
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For More Information

• itSMF (IT Service Management Forum)
  http//www.itsmf.com/
• Pink Elephant http//www.pinkelepha
  nt.com/en-US/
• LaBounty and Associates
  http//www.labountyassociates.com/
• Help Desk Institute
  http//www.helpdeskinst.com/
• Gartner
  http//www.gartner.com/

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Questions?
Peggy Gerace-Roosa Director of Operations
Communication and Reporting

• geraceme_at_corp.earthlink.net
• O 626-296-5769
• C 626-676-3670
• http//home.earthlink.net/pgerace/