From: www.itworld.com

IT on automatic pilot

by Steve Alexander

April 2, 2001 —

HERE'S A SHOCKER: IT departments are using software to automate -- themselves. It helped Walter Weir get a handle on IT projects at the University of Nebraska. Cheri Tell says Eaton figured out which programmers were doing a good job. And Bob Gupta says Esco saved $250,000 a year by automating software code changes.

These IT departments are improving their efficiency, turning around projects faster, measuring programmer effectiveness better, and saving money with new software tagged "technology chain automation" or TCA. Some users say TCA helps measure project progress, eliminate development bottlenecks, and rank project priority, all in a more proactive way than traditional project management software.

TCA tools are still new enough that their track record is scanty, says Colleen Niven, vice president of enabling technologies at Boston-based AMR Research. Niven believes that TCA' s big contribution is that it helps IT departments do a better job of controlling workflow than do other methods.

Niven also says that TCA software from companies such as Kintana of Sunnyvale, Calif., IntelliCorp of Mountain View, Calif., and ProSight of Portland, Ore., helps automate the business processes of an IT department's daily work. Components are as simple as generating automatic e-mails to a supervisor when approval is needed. Other parts are complicated and subjective, such as assigning comparative values to different IT projects for prioritization and then dividing projects into groups -- such as high and low complexity -- to be monitored separately.

When automation drives project management, IT managers need to "take care that they don't invest more in the tool and feeding the tool than the value of the tool's feedback," says Stan Johnson, associate executive director of Information System Associates at the UCLA Anderson School, in Los Angeles.

No more screaming

Walter Weir, the CIO of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, has used ProSight's eIT-Enabler product for a year, keeping track of about 300 projects handled by his 100-employee IT department. "When someone says a project is going to be late, the software makes sure we all define late in the same way," Weir says. "Whether the project involves Internet 2 research, the digital library, or SAP, we want a similar frame of reference so we know whether a project is in difficulty."

Before the university began using the TCA software, which runs on an NT server, Weir says the department managed projects the traditional way: "He who screams loudest gets heard first." But the technology chain management software "caused us to focus on how we do things. It allowed us to do things in a regularized fashion that we never had before," Weir says.

For example, when labor hours to maintain the existing university budgeting system were defined, it became clear that purchasing a new budgeting module would cost less than upgrading the current software,Weir says. Comparative cost figures for a formal purchase proposal are still being collected.

Improving value on relations outside IT

The software also has an impact outside the IT department. Since using the TCA software, Weir has found it easier to explain the status of IT department projects to university administrators.

"When I meet with the university's board and its chancellors, they ask me how the SAP project is coming along and how much we spent supporting it last month. Before we had the ProSight software I couldn't tell them without having an accountant work on the numbers for a week. Now I have real-time numbers," Weir says. In addition, the software is being used to forecast both IT project requirements and usefulness, which allows Weir to explain to university administrators the projected cost of IT projects versus their projected value.

Another upside of forecasting requirements and usefulness is the ability to weed out those IT projects not worth pursuing, Weir says. That's because the software forces the IT department to rate a project's "value" based on several criteria such as complexity, how closely the project relates to strategic objectives, how many users the project ultimately will affect, and how many hours will be needed to finish the project.

Because new IT projects are subjected to this same value rating system when they arrive at the university IT department, it's easier for the IT department to decide how to assign people with certain skills to projects, or to decide that the right people aren't available, Weir says.

The ProSight software works in a hierarchy with Microsoft Project 2000 and the university's data warehouse. The warehouse aggregates the costs of running an IT project, then feeds that data in the right sequence to Microsoft Project, which in turns feeds data to the ProSight software, Weir says.

Automating project management and having costs and schedules in real time have given Weir a high comfort level. "When I come to work in the morning, I can quickly see projects that are in trouble, get a feeling about which projects are OK. That way I can make sure I'm working on the right things," he says.

One way the software helps tip Weir off to problems is by sorting projects according to criteria the IT department has set up. For example, Weir can ask to see the status of all projects that are defined as providing high-functionality but which aren't very complex to do -- in other words, projects which the IT department should be able to finish quickly. If such a project slips behind schedule, a green warning light on Weir's screen turns to yellow or red.

So far, Weir says the university IT department has raised awareness of how to measure the status of IT projects, but isn't far enough along to measure dollar savings. But he believes he has more than made back the cost of the software, which as a beta user Weir obtained for $25,000 in annual maintenance costs and a one-time $80,000 consulting fee.

Coding TCA change

Cheri Tell, manager of production/integration at Eaton, a manufacturer of hydraulic and electrical systems, in Cleveland, uses Kintana Deliver and Kintana Accelerator for Oracle Applications to speeed implementation of enterprise software code changes.

Enterprise code changes go through four environments at Eaton: development, testing, acceptance, and production. At each stage, supervisors must sign off before code changes move to the next level.

Before the use of TCA, this review process was cumbersome at best. In addition, a lack of automation slowed the actual implementation of new code because Eaton was moving hundreds of code changes into 60 or 70 different Oracle environments. But with the TCA software, the process is smoother and accelerated because TCA automates the approval process, Tell says.

"At every stage of the code's development and testing, an automated e-mail is sent to all the people who must approve. We can even set up the e-mail so it will send certain specific information to exactly the right people, so no one has to remember to whom a request for approval must go," Tell says.

The software also tracks whether or not those who receive automated messages act promptly. Tell says this allows management to locate the bottlenecks -- usually a person or group of people letting a project languish.

The software also automates the actual code installation, reducing a manual process to a single mouse-click once all approvals have been obtained. As a result, the number of IT workers involved in the implementation of code changes can be drastically reduced, Tell says. For example, Tell's IT department has been able to reduce its head count by two $120,000-a-year positions formerly held by people with titles such as database administrator or developer, Tell says.

"We still need database administrators and developers to do the up-front work on code changes. But with TCA software, a lesser-skilled person can handle the implementation. The [database administrators] and developers can do other things," Tell says.

The TCA software also has sharply reduced errors in implementing new code for systems such as payroll, Tell says. For the first time at Eaton, Tell has an IT audit trail that helps find out how any errors occurred.

"Each time code is migrated, the software records the user ID of who migrated it, what version it is, when it happened in the cycle, and whether there was a successful installation or an error," Tell says. "We've used this information on IT department performance evaluations for developers. If we see someone is having code rejected an unacceptable number of times, that is noted. As a result, the IT department has gotten rid of people for not doing a good job."

Tell says the results from using TCA are tangible. The average enterprise code change at Eaton now takes one day instead of seven days, and an emergency code change now take four hours instead of 24 hours. At the rate of 170 code change requests per month, Tell figures that TCA is saving Eaton $6,000 per month in addition to savings in salary costs.

Bob Gupta, the application development manager at Esco, a Portland, Ore.-based manufacturer of machine parts for the mining and construction industries, is also using Kintana Deliver and Kintana Accelerator for Oracle Applications software to automate IT code changes, previously a paper-driven process.

"The software is workflow driven. Once there is a request to migrate a piece of code from development to production, the software sends e-mails to those who need to review and approve the work. Eventually those approvals reach the database administrator group that actually performs the code migration," Gupta says. The software also automates the code migration by not requiring error-prone retyping of code migration commands.

Downside of management by machine

Some think that relying on TCA to manage and evaluate IT professionals is problematic. "The upside of automateed project management is that you have peer pressure and public exposure on accountability," says Tom Steding, author of Built on Trust and vice president of content management software developer Interwoven, in Sunnyvale, Calif. "The downside is that you have fear-based motivation. You won't have a high trust environment where staff feels free to speak up before problems are disclosed by the software."

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